


Dark Skies To Wet Grass

by commoncomitatus



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 7 [8]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: F/F, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Identity Issues, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-08 06:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 50,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8833432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Picks up a couple of hours post-"The Xena Scrolls".  A series of unfortunate events leaves Mel struggling with who she is and what she might become.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently I'm not done tormenting these two. Oops.
> 
> This fic fills a Cross-Square extra on my [Hurt/Comfort Bingo](http://hc-bingo.livejournal.com/) card.  
> Prompts: Stranded / Survival Scenario, Unwanted Transformation

***

Janice Covington was not a handsome woman.

As a matter of fact, Mel found that she needed to study her in great sweeping detail just to be sure that she really was a woman at all.

That was not an easy task. The studying itself, of course — being raised proper and decent, Melinda Pappas was firmly of the opinion that staring was both rude and uncouth — but also the being sure. She might have forgiven herself some of the impropriety if she thought it was getting her anywhere, but trying to make sense of the woman sitting next to her was a task not unlike squeezing blood from a stone.

It was nigh on two full hours since they’d left the remains of Janice’s dig site. Two hours of being rude and uncouth, of stealing glances and staring — gawking, even! — with slack-jawed abandon, and after all that time Mel found that she was no closer to unravelling the deep dark secrets of Janice Covington than she was when she first walked into her tent all that time ago.

The puzzles were myriad, and stubbornly complex. It was difficult enough, Mel found, just figuring out where her face was hiding under the brim of that ridiculous hat; any chance of piercing the shadows in search of lines or curves or the like was simply impossible. The clothes, of course, made it harder still; a dusty old jacket thrown over a shirt so filthy and ill-fitting that only the good Lord could hazard a guess at what might be lurking underneath. Then, lower to the point of impropriety, the belt and the holster and the veritable arsenal of weapons hanging from her hips.

(Assuming, of course, that there were any hips to speak of; underneath all that nonsense, who could say for sure?)

Doctor Covington didn’t seem to mind the shamelessness or the lack of manners. But then, that was no surprise; from what little she’d learned of the good doctor, manners in general were something of a foreign language. At any rate, she wasn’t complaining about Mel’s reprehensible behaviour, which given her attitude thus far was saying a lot. Possibly she hadn’t noticed, focused as she was on the road ahead, but on the other hand perhaps she just didn’t care. Mel wondered if she often found herself the subject of such attention, dressing and acting the way she did. Maybe she was so long accustomed to stares and whispers that she was simply inured to them.

It was an unpleasant, uncomfortable thought. Ashamed of herself, Mel turned her face away.

The road, stretching out like a slash in the midnight dark, made for a convenient distraction for them both. Janice, driving with the same wild abandon she seemed to do everything, was locked on the horizon like it was a kind of lifeline. Her eyes glittered darkly under the brim of her hat, her expression tight and tense; she seemed almost feverish in her desperation to put as much distance as possible between herself and the remains of her dig site. Never mind silly little things like speed limits or basic safety, never mind anything at all; she had her heart set on something and that was all that mattered. She drove like her life depended on it, like both their lives did, swept up in a sort of frenzy, like she couldn’t slow down even if she wanted to. For someone like Mel, rather more accustomed to the slow lane, it was more than a little frightening.

As for Mel herself… well. All she could do was cling to the dashboard and pray.

It was perhaps ten minutes after Mel’s embarrassment made her turn away that Janice finally spoke. She turned in her seat, cleared her throat, and said, “You can ask, you know.”

The words came out of nowhere, the first ones either of them had said since they left town. They’d swung by Mel’s hotel to pick up her things; Janice had tossed them in the back of her truck, not sparing so much as a thought for the delicates or a moment for Mel to catch her breath, and then they were back out on the road again. Given the choice, Mel would have appreciated a minute or two to change out of her ripped old skirt, but Janice insisted they couldn’t afford it.

 _“No time for that sort of crap,”_ she’d snapped. _“Let’s get going.”_

So they did, and Janice hadn’t uttered a word since. She was a silent driver, focused almost to the point of obsession, and Mel held her tongue too as a mark of respect. Janice hadn’t exactly proven herself an eager conversationalist up to that point, after all, and given the reckless way she drove it didn’t seem wise or safe to distract her. Self-preservation and good old-fashioned common sense said that the decent thing to do was wait her out, let her dictate the flow of things for the both of them; she was the one in the driving seat, after all, figuratively as much as literally.

Now, finally, after what felt like an eternity of gawking and clinging and praying, Janice had broken the silence… and all Mel had to offer in return was a blank stare.

“I beg your pardon?”

Janice rolled her eyes. “You know,” she said with exaggerated evenness. “You’ve been bashing your head against the wall for the last thirty miles trying to figure it out, so you might as well just ask.”

Mel floundered. “I’m sure I don’t…”

“Come on.” Janice bared her teeth. They were very sharp. “ _Do you use the ladies’ room, Doc, or the men’s?_ ”

“Oh my.” Mel opened and closed her mouth a few times. “I mean… I would never…”

“Sure you wouldn’t.” Janice barked a laugh. It definitely wasn’t kind, but it wasn’t as cruel as Mel expected either. “Well, you can stop your wondering. You’re not in South Carolina any more, sweetheart. Round here, you piss in whatever pot you can find. Ain’t a soul who’ll care what equipment you use for the job.” She tore her gaze from the road, fixed it on Mel; her eyes, still halfway hidden, were as sharp as her smile. “But that’s not what you’re _really_ asking, now, is it?”

Mel didn’t point out that she never actually asked anything, real or otherwise. She didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot or seem insensitive, so she just hung her head and blushed. “No, ma’am. I reckon it’s not.”

“Course it’s not,” Janice said. “What you really wanna know is what the hell I’m hiding under my old man’s shirt.” She cut a glance at Mel’s figure, long and lingering and entirely inappropriate. “Not as much as you, that’s for damn sure.”

“I…” Mel blushed some more. “Well, that’s… I don’t really think…”

“Relax, will you? Jeez.” Turning her attention back to the road where it belonged, Janice sobered. The moon flickered, a shrouded reflection behind her eyes, and Mel felt her mouth go dry. “I’m a woman, okay? Might not look or talk or act like one. Hell, might not even think like one most of the time. But in all the ways that’d matter to a dame like you…” She heaved a tired sigh, like maybe it wasn’t really so simple after all. “Yeah, I’m a woman.”

“Well, now, of course you are.” The feint at levity fell painfully flat, but still she had to try. Propriety demanded that she at least make some effort at saving face, for both their sakes. “You’re too darn short not to be.”

Janice let out a strange, strangled noise. In the darkness of the truck’s cab, Mel couldn’t tell whether she was angry or amused; she decided it would be safer to simply always assume the former from now on.

“Great,” Janice said after a long, awkward moment. “Now that everyone’s anatomy is out in the open and no-one is feeling the least bit uncomfortable, you can stop staring at me and get some sleep.”

“I…” Again, Mel could only squeak helplessly. “I’m sorry?”

Janice grunted her annoyance. “Sleep,” she repeated, very slowly this time, like she was talking to a small, foolish child. “You. Get some.”

Mel flushed all over again, albeit for a very different reason now. She was long accustomed to being spoken down to and treated like the village idiot, some silly young thing who didn’t even know her own name. As a woman with scholarly pursuits but who at the same time revelled in being womanly, who had the gall to believe that womanliness and intelligence could coexist quite peacefully in the same body, and as a gal from the South who refused to hide her accent even when she knew it would do her wrong, condescension was practically a second language.

Mel had dealt with underestimation all her life, her would-be peers sneering and simpering and whispering behind her back, but her refusal to sit there and take it like a lady had become the stuff of legend. She knew perfectly well how to treat the sort of gentleman who would come calling with a smug little smirk on his lips, how to calmly and politely tell him that his particular brand of conversation was not welcome; indeed, there weren’t many gentleman left in South Carolina who hadn’t fallen before her wrath a time or two.

…but then, as they’d established just a few short moments ago, Janice Covington was no gentleman. And Mel’s wrath, such as it was, held absolutely no power over her.

Thus did her confidence dissolve, shrinking in the cold night air like certain other things only applicable to gentlemen.

“I’m not a child,” she said, though she did not sound calm or polite at all. “I reckon I’d know for myself when I’m tired.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re tired,” Janice said flatly. The language was crude, but there was no real malice in the way she used it; she was impatient but not angry. “Sleep anyway.”

“Well, now, how do you expect…”

“We can’t afford to stop,” Janice said. Her voice was sharper now, and strangely pitchy. “That means you’re gonna have to relieve me in a few hours.”

“Oh.” Mel winced, embarrassed. “Well… ah… I’m afraid I don’t… that is, I can’t…”

“Foot on the pedal,” Janice said. “Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Don’t fall asleep if you can help it. Jesus Christ, a two-year-old could do it.”

“Be that as it may,” Mel said, as politely as she could, “I don’t—”

“ _Melinda_.”

All of a sudden her voice was like a razor blade, keen and straight and lethal. It wasn’t just the name — _Melinda_ rather than _Mel_ — but the way she said it. Janice was a difficult woman to read, Mel was starting to realise, but there was no mistaking the severity in her now, the quiet way she said _‘this is important’_ without wasting her time on the words. She sounded like a general barking orders at a faceless sea of soldiers, a worldly old man schooling cocksure young boys who couldn’t possibly understand the weight of what was happening. It seethed like anger, that razor in her voice, but that wasn’t really what it was. It was more like tension than rage, the torn-muscle strain of someone shouldering a great and heavy burden and knowing that they couldn’t trust it with anyone else.

Mel sighed, feeling contrite and not really knowing why. “It’s really that important we don’t stop?”

“Yeah.” Janice turned away, squinting into the rear-view mirror like she halfway expected Ares himself to come charging down the road after them, like she didn’t just blow her entire supply of explosives on sealing him in his old tomb. “This is the gig you signed up for,” she added, dangerously low. “You want out, just say the word.”

“Well, now, I never said that.”

Janice didn’t smile, but her jaw got just a little looser and a little less white. Her body relaxed a little too, shoulders slumping wearily against the seat. Mel blinked at the sight of her, measuring the width of that strange not-quite-smile. She wondered now, for perhaps the first time, if this little arrangement of theirs wasn’t quite the simple one-sided affair she’d assumed it was.

It had all seemed so straightforward at the time. Mel the idealistic young newcomer, and Janice the weather-beaten archaeologist who didn’t need nothing from no-one. Mel was so hungry and thirsty for adventure and experience, so eager to prove herself, but Janice had never given any indication that it was a companion she wanted.

That not-quite-smile, though? _Well, I’ll be darned if it don’t say the very opposite._

Eyes on the road, glittering under her hat, Janice said, “Get some sleep, Mel.”

*

Mel did get some sleep, but not very much.

In her defence, though, that wasn’t entirely her fault. It wasn’t easy trying to drift off with Janice driving like the god of war himself was on her tail; she slipped into a doze now and then, but it was always with one eye halfway open, ever aware of the fact that the next bend might be their last. Her muscles felt like solid stone under her skin, hard and tight, and she couldn’t seem to relax. It was as though some part of her was constantly bracing for some nameless, faceless threat, as though Xena was still alive inside her somehow, lighting up all her nerves and whetting her reflexes, awakening her to things she’d never had any reason to think about before.

She had a reason now, though. And all too soon she would have another.

It was the _crack_ that woke her. It was deafening, and in the half-second before she jolted back to consciousness Mel had no idea what in the world could make such a noise. The truck screeched and lurched, a burst of impact that rocked her violently back to the waking world, effectively chasing off what little sleep she’d managed to get. She jerked upright, fumbling for her glasses as the whiplash zigzagged painfully up and down her neck.

“Now, what in the—”

“Shut up and get down!”

Mel didn’t get a chance to ask again, or to say anything else. The truck banked and then skidded, the tyres letting out another deafening screech as they fought for traction; this time the engine joined in, a howling, grinding whine that set Mel’s teeth on edge. The violence of it all was enough to knock her clean out of her seat; she hit the floor hard, and didn’t bother trying to get back up again. Prudently, she huddled down under the dashboard and clung fast to whatever solid surface she could reach in the futile hope of staying inside the darn thing.

_Merciful heavens, Doctor Covington! Couldn’t you afford a door?_

“Good,” Janice hissed, from way up in the driver’s seat. “Stay there.”

Well, Mel didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter, now, did she? The truck came to a bone-crunching stop, darn near toppling itself right over in the process, and it was all she could do to just hold on to the dashboard. The impact rattled like a blow between her ribs, sent her head into an awful spin, and for the longest moment she couldn’t see or think or even breathe. Her vision was blurry and fractured, and though she could tell the truck was at a complete standstill, she was sure she could feel the world whirling and churning all around her like a darn carousel.

She opened her mouth to try and make sense of things — _what in the world is going on?_ — but the words were lost before she could force them out, silenced and suffocated by a storm of small but sudden explosions.

 _Gunshots,_ she realised, recalling with a sick sense of dread her first run-in with Janice. It was just a few short hours ago — maybe half a dozen or so by now — but given everything that came after it felt like a lifetime and a half, the memory a barely-existent shadow that shimmered like gold dust inside of her; it churned and spun her head around, giving the illusion that the truck was still moving.

 _I could’ve been killed,_ she thought, paralysed with fear. _I could have been killed back then, and now I could be killed all over again. How many times in one day can a gal get shot at without taking a darn bullet?_

She pressed herself flat against the floor of the truck, trembling and hyperventilating. The metal vibrated against her clothes, her skin, humming in staccato rhythm with the gunshot explosions. Terrified for her life, Mel squeezed her eyes shut and whispered every prayer she knew.

Janice, meanwhile, was not nearly so spiritual. She was muttering under her breath, hissing and cursing and spitting; at one point she cried out, a violent sort of roar like an animal, then launched into a string of words so colourful that Mel could scarcely imagine their meaning. Her voice, so full of authority just a moment ago, was suddenly high and very tight.

The shots died down all at once, a sudden shriek of silence that made the hairs stand up on the back of Mel’s neck. She lay there for a few long moments, struggling to restart her breathing. Then, slowly and very carefully, she lifted her head.

“Janice?”

“ _Down_ , goddammit!”

She sounded like she was choking. Mel tried to find her face, to catch some hint of what was going on, but the air was dark and thick with gunsmoke and she could not pierce it for love nor money. She couldn’t see much of anything at all, only Janice’s legs, the muscles tensing and straining as they launched her up and out of the truck. She was still swearing, spitting out curses through clenched teeth, and there was a lurching unsteadiness in the way her shadow moved. She was swaying on her feet, Mel realised as her vision cleared, like she was drunk or sick or something. She didn’t do that back at the dig.

Mel wanted to go after her. She wanted to at least call her name again, but the memory of that moment in the tent stole the strength from her whole darn body.

The shooting was over. She knew that because the silence was still so deafening; even the tiniest little sounds seemed amplified to impossible, excruciating levels. She could hear Janice’s footsteps, heavy and uneven out in the dirty gravel, and then another stream of curses.

 _Come back,_ Mel thought, terrified and desperate. _Don’t leave me all on my lonesome here in this big old tin coffin. Don’t leave me in here to die! Don’t you dare leave me in here to die!_

Time blurred and meshed and swam, the panic making it behave in the most erratic fashion. She didn’t know how long she stayed there, crouched and huddled and trembling under the dashboard; all she knew with any kind of certainty was that it couldn’t be nearly as long as it felt.

Then, at long last, cutting like a bullet through the air, “ _Mel_!”

The sound of her own name had a strange effect on Mel Pappas: her mind went completely blank, and her body swiftly followed suit. She didn’t know what to do, and for a long terrible moment she could not react at all.

Janice’s voice was as clear as a bell, strong and brave and void of fear as it always seemed to be. She made it quite obvious that they were out of danger, that the bullets weren’t about to start flying again any time soon, but still something in the way she spoke made Mel freeze. There was something else in her, a strained, intangible something, and Mel’s heart leaped up into her mouth at the sound of it. Janice might not be scared, but she was, shaking clean down to her bones, driven halfway to madness by a thousand visions of what she might find when she lifted her head and found the courage to step outside.

Sheltered as she was, as she had been all her life, Mel had never been in a gunfight before that afternoon. Heck, she’d never even seen a real honest-to-goodness bullet. Now, in the space of just a few short hours, she had been shot at more times than she could even count. It gave only the smallest measure of comfort that she had once again come out unscathed.

She took a deep breath, trying in vain to steady herself, to focus on that part instead of the other. It took a far greater force of will than she’d care to admit; courage wasn’t exactly on the list of requisite skills for a Southern lady, after all. Mel had always prided herself on being stronger than most, tough enough to take on whatever life’s little adventures happened to throw at her, but this was in a whole other class to anything she had ever experienced before. This brave new world of androgynous archaeologists and ancient scrolls, of gunshots and gods and goodness knew what else… _well_. Janice was surely right about one thing: she was not in South Carolina any more.

Moving slowly and very carefully, she hauled herself up and stumbled out of the truck.

“I’m here…” she croaked, pleased that her voice only shook a little bit. “…I think.”

Squinting through the lamplight and the lingering gunsmoke, she saw Janice crouched a short distance away, hunching over the unmistakable silhouette of a body. The truck’s headlamps threw long, eerie shadows over them both, making the scene look incredibly stark. Mel’s chest felt very heavy, her breath coming ragged as she struggled not to pass out, to take in the scene without making a fool of herself. For a brief, madness-driven moment, she wondered if she’d stumbled onto some old movie set by mistake.

“Mel!” Janice’s voice was strangely pitchy, like maybe she was going halfway mad as well. “Get your ass over here, will ya?”

Mel did as she was told, scurrying over as fast as her broken heels would carry her. In another moment of delirium, wholly detached from the one she was presently living, she found herself wishing that Xena had been just a little kinder to her poor clothes. She’d noticed the damage earlier, had even winced a little when it happened, but at the time she was just a silent observer, a guest inside her own head.

She hadn’t needed to appear in control back then like she did now, though, and that made all the difference. Now, far more for her own sake than Janice’s, she needed the illusion of composure. Looking down at herself — the off-balance shoes and their broken heels, the rumpled blouse and the tear in her skirt — she realised for the first time that it was gone. The composure, yes, but more importantly the control it brought. It simply was not possible to appear strong in such a dismal state.

“I’m here,” she said again. The words were a squeak, as wobbly as her gait, but at least she got them out.

“Good,” Janice said, voice tighter still, then spun about to face her.

Mel’s eyes got as wide as saucers. “Oh _my_ …” she whispered, and felt herself grow faint.

Like so many things that had happened to her over the last few hours, Mel had never seen a real-life bullet wound before. She hadn’t even really seen them in the movies; even just the idea was enough to make her blanch and shudder. Now, far away from the fictive world of black-and-white, all she could see was blood.

It was much, much darker than she thought it would be. She had seen her own blood, of course, the grazed knees and scraped elbows of a childhood lived happily, a bloody nose after a particularly unpleasant fall or the thin red line after she cut her finger chopping vegetables… the list went on and on. There was no shortage of little dangers even in the lazy, quiet South, but her blood back then looked very different to Janice’s here and now. Her own came out red and bright, clean and simple and never enough to make a real mess. Janice’s… goodness, that was something very different.

The stuff was almost black. Glistening wetly under the headlamps, it looked more like tar than anything that might have any place inside a person. And there was so darn much of it! Mel had never seen so much in one place before, and it very nearly made her ill. She needed to close her eyes for a long moment, needed to brace herself before she could even try to look at it, and even then it was a struggle far beyond her tolerance.

Janice’s jacket was ripped at the shoulder, her shirt soaked through underneath. Mel couldn’t see the hole beyond all that tarry black blood, but for all her worry she found that she didn’t have the stomach to ask about it.

All of a sudden, she thought, the shaky pitch of Janice’s voice and the drunken unsteadiness of her step made a terrible, nightmarish amount of sense. _Why didn’t I see it sooner,_ she wondered, hating herself.

Looking up at her, Janice mustered a tight, strained smile. She was handling it surprisingly well, Mel thought. Better than she herself was, certainly, though the thought was of very little comfort at the moment.

“Yeah.” Janice’s voice rose a little as she spoke, still shaky but definitely controlled. “Afraid I’m gonna need your help.”

“My…?” Mel felt even fainter. “Oh my… oh no… no, I couldn’t possibly…”

“You see anyone else around here?”

Mel noted with some alarm that Janice’s legs were shaking under her. She seemed to be holding herself up by sheer force of will, as though she knew that it would make Mel panic if she let herself slip even a little. It wasn’t much better, frankly, seeing her like this, trying so hard to seem stronger than she was for someone else’s sake; Mel might be holding her horror under control, but now she felt guilty as well.

“I…” She swallowed. Where was Xena’s strength and experience when she needed it? “Well, I…”

“Look,” Janice said. “It’s not a big deal, okay? I know how to take a bullet, and I know how to…” She hesitated, then sighed. “But I can’t do it on my own. So I’m gonna… I’m gonna need you to suck it up for a while. Okay? I’m gonna need you to stop being so goddamn Southern or ladylike or whatever. I’m gonna need you to stop being _Melinda_. For just a little while, okay? Just until we’re done. You think you can do that?”

 _No,_ Mel thought wretchedly. _That’s what I am. What else am I supposed to be?_

But even as she thought it, she knew the answer. She could feel it there in the back of her head, a voice that was both new and impossibly old. _I’m here,_ it said, and Mel felt her pulse slow with someone else’s strength, the very strength she’d wished for barely a moment ago.

“I’ll try,” she said.

“Good girl.”

Janice was breathing steadily through her nose, in and out and in and out, slow and slow and slow. Watching her, Mel tried to do the same. 

“I don’t know how…”

“I’ll talk you through it,” Janice said, timing the words to the rhythm of her breath. “It ain’t gonna be pretty but that… that’s okay. I promise. You’ll be just fine.”

“Me?” Mel mustered, bolstered by the absurdity. “Why, I’m not the one with a—”

“ _Mel_.” Janice swayed. “Kinda losing blood here. Can we argue semantics some other time?”

Mel forced back the nausea and the dizziness, the urge to vomit or faint or run away. The panic could wait, she decided, and straightened her spine. She could humiliate herself later, when they were both in one piece and far away from all of this, when Janice was sufficiently in one piece to chide her for it. Goodness, but it felt so strange to want such a thing.

She took a deep breath, turned her spine and her voice to steel.

“All right,” she said. “What do you need?”

*

Obedience had always come naturally to her.

What a blessing it was to be so well practised in taking orders, in shutting off her thoughts and doing no more or less than what she was told. It served her well, helped her to block out the sight of all that black blood, kept her focused in a way she couldn’t have managed alone. Funny, she thought, how people like Janice so often thought obedience was weakness; for Mel, it was one of the few things that had ever made her strong.

She helped Janice back to the truck, sat her down with her back against the chassis, then set to work rummaging around for medical supplies. 

“Liquor and bandages,” Janice told her. “Should be a box in there somewhere… for Christ’s sake, don’t get blood on the scrolls!”

Naturally, Mel ignored that last part. She supposed it shouldn’t surprise her that a woman as obviously danger-prone as Janice Covington would have the means for treating gunshot wounds stashed away in the back of her truck, but still the sight of the dented, well-used first-aid kit landed strangely in her chest, a vicious punch-like feeling that she only halfway understood.

“Guess you weren’t fooling,” she mused sadly, “when you said you knew how to do this.”

Scurrying back to Janice’s side, she set the first-aid kit down on the ground, balanced the liquor bottle next to it, then leaned in to try and get a look at her face.

Janice, to no-one’s surprise, made that something of a a challenge. She had her hat off now, and was holding it in front of her face like a kind of shield; no doubt she thought she could hide the pain by obscuring her features, as though Mel would have cared a whit if she let slip that it hurt. Not that it mattered in the end; all the face-hiding in the world couldn’t keep the suffering out of her voice. The second she opened up her mouth, all that hurt just tumbled straight on out.

“Might’ve done this a time or two,” she said. “Or ten.”

Mel’s heart ached. “My goodness.”

Wan though the exclamation was, she meant it. She couldn’t imagine living that sort of life at all, much less alone like Janice was. Heaven only knew how long it was since her daddy died, since she took up his little quest. Wasn’t it lonely? Wasn’t it dangerous and difficult? How in the world had she done this ‘a time or two’, or even ten, without no-one around to help?

Janice didn’t give her the chance to ask any of those questions, to let them become anything more than an idle wondering. She cracked her cheeks into a grimacing sort of grin and, with no small measure of seriousness, said, “Still time to run for the hills if you want.”

Mel blinked, eyes fixed on all that blood. “Now?”

“Well. Soon as you finish patching me up, I guess.”

All of a sudden, it was mighty tempting. Still, Mel shook her head, reminded herself as well as Janice that it was not an option right now.

“We’ll see,” she said, knowing all too well how pathetic that sounded.

Janice mustered a throaty chuckle, blessedly unoffended, then shrugged out of her jacket with a barely-concealed whimper. The right side of her shirt was a mess of blood, and Mel reached out automatically to try and find the wound.

“No.” Janice slapped her knuckles with the brim of her hat, then guided Mel’s fingers to her shirt buttons. “Get the damn thing off me.”

She flinched at the contact, though, like she was at odds with herself, rebelling against the need for help in the same moment as she accepted that it was necessary. It was a hard thing to do, touching her like that when every move made her shake like she was being violated. Mel wondered if the pain of being weak was almost worse than the pain of being shot.

 _How long has it been since you had someone to do this for you,_ she thought, heartbroken. _Am I the first since your daddy?_

She pushed the thought aside, knowing that Janice would not appreciate it, and tried to focus instead on the task at hand. It wasn’t easy; her fingers were clumsy, gone almost numb with the fear and urgency, and it surely didn’t help at all that Janice wore her pain like a badge, little sucked-in breaths and whimpering groans to punctuate each of Mel’s silly amateur’s mistakes. The shirt was all but stuck to her skin, the blood working like a sort of adhesive, and Mel knew that it must hurt like the devil to peel the fabric away and get it free. Lord, how she hated to be the cause of someone’s suffering.

By the time she got the darn thing off, they were both panting. Janice, breathless with the pain, had one hand pressed tightly to the wound, no doubt trying to stem the blood, and the other fisting the dirt to ground herself and keep the pain inside. She had tossed the hat aside long ago and Mel noted how small she seemed without it, like a child deprived of the moth-eaten old blanket that chased the monsters away.

Newly exposed, her body had quite the opposite effect. Aged well beyond its years, Janice’s torso was a jagged mass of muscle and scars, more than Mel had ever seen in one place. Sheltered as she was, that likely wasn’t saying very much, but the knowledge did little to silence her gasps. For a long moment, the bullet wound halfway forgotten, she was mesmerised by the patterns burned beneath the skin.

There was so much pain, not just there on her shoulder but everywhere else as well, all tangled and knotted up and down and across; to someone as unschooled in such things as Mel was, it seemed almost like poetry, like the secrets of the scrolls were scrawled out indelibly underneath the skin. How long would they need to travel together, she wondered, before Janice would allow her to read and translate them as well?

“You’re not gonna faint on me, are you?” Janice asked, cutting through her thoughts.

Apparently she’d misinterpreted the attention for squeamishness. Mel swallowed very hard, willing herself to imagine it was only that.

“I surely hope not,” she said.

“Good.” Janice looked down at herself for a moment or two, appraising what little she could see of the wound. “I don’t think it’s too bad.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.” It wasn’t the answer she’d been hoping for, to be quite honest. “But I’m not dead yet, or seizing or coughing up blood, or choking on my own—”

“Please stop!”

Janice chuckled a little at her weakness, then closed her eyes for a long while. Her hand fell away from the wound, dropping down to hang uselessly at her side. Mel felt her stomach rise up into her throat, but she forced herself to look at the wound while she could, to learn and memorise the sort of damage a gun could do. If she chose not to ‘run for the hills’, even after all this, she had a feeling she would need to know.

“Take a good look,” Janice said. Apparently, she was thinking the very same thing. That wasn’t exactly comforting. She waited patiently for Mel to finish, then leaned her body forward with a low moan. “Now look for an exit wound.”

Mel blinked a couple of times. Though she felt lost, she didn’t dare to ask any more questions, afraid of getting another slew of unpleasantly graphic answers. She wasn’t entirely sure what _“I don’t think it’s too bad”_ really meant in terms of bullets and holes, and she didn’t want to push her luck by finding out the truth.

All she wanted, simple and idealistic and foolish as she was, was to fix the darn thing. She wanted to make it go away, the blood and the hole and the pain turning Janice’s face pale. She wanted to pour the colour back into her, bring the clarity back to her eyes and light her back up; she wanted to bring back that subtle little not-quite-smile, the familiarity and the beauty she saw when she remembered being Xena. She wanted to _heal_ her, not just of the bullet wound but of everything else too, to mend and undo all the pain she saw carved out on a body far too young to have accumulated so much.

She couldn’t, though. She couldn’t do any of those things. All she could do, all she had ever been able to do, was what she was told. Murmuring futile prayers, her link to the Almighty the only constant in her life, she squinted through the bloody swamp and searched.

It was bigger, the exit wound, but it was there, and thank the Lord it looked clean. Not that Mel had any way of knowing for sure whether that meant anything, or even if she had the right of it. Was there really any difference between a bad hole and a good one?

She blinked, feeling light-headed, then shrugged and touched it.

Janice, rather understandably, threw back her head and screamed.

Mel had never heard such an awful racket in all her life. It sounded like torture, only she was the one who’d inflicted it. She felt simultaneously sick from the sound and guilty for having caused such a thing in the first place. _This is no place for me,_ she thought brokenly. _What in the world was I thinking, pretending I could be of any help to her? Lord have mercy, you’d think a gal would know better than to prod at open wounds._

“I’m so sorry,” she whimpered out loud, though she knew it wasn’t nearly enough. “I didn’t… I wasn’t… I mean…”

When she stopped howling, Janice gulped air and glared at her. She was red in the face, eyes watering but more deadly than all the bullets in the world. Mel wanted to apologise again, to apologise a thousand times over if that was what it took to undo this, but she couldn’t. Janice’s eyes held her captive, mute and paralysed and utterly useless.

“Do that again,” Janice growled, when she could breathe again, “and I’ll break your damn fingers.”

Given the circumstances, Mel let the cruelty slide. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

Janice glared some more, then grabbed the liquor. She took a great big swig, nearly a quarter of the bottle in one long mouthful, then shoved it forcefully it at Mel.

“Pour it on.”

Mel blinked.

Janice massaged her temples. Her limbs were shaking, her eyes getting glassy. Mel wondered if she was losing coherence, and how much of it was her fault for touching the darn thing. She wanted to weep, and the only thing that stopped her was the fact that she wanted far more desperately to help. Being possibly the world’s worst multi-tasker, she could only pick one failure at a time.

“Pour it on,” Janice said again, slower this time. “Front, then back. Get ’em clean.” She slumped sideways against the truck, panting. “Then the bandages. Bind it as tight as you can. Don’t worry about hurting me. Just stop the damn bleeding.”

Mel swallowed nervously. “I’ll do my best,” she managed.

“Good.” Janice took a deep breath, bracing herself, and Mel took the opportunity to do the same. “Do it.”

She screamed again when Mel poured the liquor on, but at least Mel was ready for it this time. Still, the sound lanced through her just like it did before, tearing her up inside like a different kind of bullet. Again she found that she wanted to cry or faint, or else simply walk away before she could do any more damage, and again she stopped herself because she knew that Janice needed her more, that she was the only thing standing between this brave woman, this woman who had already suffered so much, and yet more pain.

They were all alone out here, just the two of them; there was no-one else at all, not counting the body of the fella who’d shot at them, and even if there were it wouldn’t matter. Janice had let her tag along, had invited Mel to be a part of this weird and frightening world of hers. Mel had no intention of repaying her hospitality with cowardice and weakness… or, worse, self-pity.

“You all right?” she asked, when the screaming finally stopped.

Forcing a smile, Janice grabbed the bottle out of her hands. “Just peachy, sweetheart,” she said, then promptly drained the thing dry.

Mel thought about chiding her for the indulgence, but the good Lord knew she’d earned it. So, instead, she focused on what was more important, scrambling for the bandages and trying in vain to recall what Janice had told her. 

“You sure it’s not so bad?”

“Sure as I can be,” Janice said. Her mouth was very wet, but she didn’t slur at all. “Tight as you can, remember?”

Mel nodded, grateful for the reminder, and did her best. She had never bound a wound like this before, and she didn’t know whether she was doing well or not; she could only go by what seemed tight to her trembling, clumsy fingers. Was it enough? How would she even know?

True to her word, Janice guided her through it, explaining with as much patience as she could how to do it, where to keep the pressure strongest, how to make sure the gauze stayed taut. Mel fought back the tremors; it sat unpleasantly with her that Janice was still the tough one, that even in such an awful state she had to stay in control; again Mel found herself distracted by wondering how many times the poor woman must have gone through this alone to be so strong now that she had someone.

“Not all fun and games out here, huh?” Mel asked quietly.

“Not really.” Janice was swallowing convulsively, breathing through her nose with each pull of the bandage. Mel wondered if maybe she wasn’t the only one feeling queasy from all this. “Offer’s still on the table, you know. Any time you want to cut and run…”

“And leave you here like this? Alone? _Again_?” Suddenly angry, Mel yanked on the bandage so hard that Janice yelped. “Not on your life.”

“Didn’t mean right now,” Janice said, when she caught her breath again. “I mean any time. Now or tomorrow or next year, whenever the hell you want. Any time it gets too much, you turn and you run. No hard feelings.”

Mel looked down into her face, studied the lines she found there. Without her hat, Janice looked much, much younger than her years; the sight of her struck a match inside Mel’s heart, ignited feelings that weren’t her own.

In great romantic detail, she remembered being Xena, recalled the flood of emotion that rose up in her when the warrior princess gazed down at Gabrielle’s descendant and saw the face of her lover. She was so proud, so completely in love. The feelings weren’t truly Mel’s, of course, but it was her heart that started to pound, her stomach that grew warm, her body that responded to the sight of Janice and the memory of Gabrielle, that looked down at an angry, troubled archaeologist and saw a beautiful young bard.

It was her body that responded now, too, reaching out without a thought to touch Janice’s face, to brush her hair back and drown in the eyes she knew both so intimately and not at all.

“I’m not leaving,” she said, and meant it with all her heart. “Not now, not never.”

*

Back on her feet, Janice stomped back to the truck.

She tugged her shirt back over her good shoulder, no doubt needing the warmth, but left the injured one exposed for ease of access. The jacket, she threw into the back of the truck, scowling and muttering about how much of a pain it would be to repair. Mel, who until that point had assumed her shoulder was the more pressing issue, was beginning to suspect the good doctor was more annoyed by the damage to her property than to her darn body.

Mel didn’t follow her back to the truck. With the immediate crisis out of the way and Janice’s face once more hidden under that silly old hat, there was nothing left to distract her from the bigger picture. All of a sudden, she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from the blood-drenched gravel, the dirt and the dust all gone black and red, soaked through with the evidence of what had happened here.

How many other parts of this endless continent had stains just like this? Where else had Janice spilled her blood into the dirt and the dust? How many other bullets had passed through her body and vanished into the night, never to be seen again? And how many lifeless corpses had she left in her wake?

Mel shuffled towards the body, their shooter, scared of what she might find.

“We can’t just leave him here,” she said, even as she kept her eyes averted.

Janice stuck her head out of the truck. “Yeah, we can,” she shouted back. “He’s finished. Done. _Kaput_.”

“Well, I can see that,” Mel said. “But that’s not…”

Janice snarled, impatient and on edge. “Just get in the goddamn truck, will ya?”

Though she knew she was playing with fire, Mel did not. She was struck, seemingly from out of nowhere, by an overwhelming need to see the body for herself, to know exactly what kind of mess they were leaving behind, to acknowledge, even just for her own benefit, that she was here and a part of this.

She closed the space between them inch by inch, intimidated in spite of herself, and leaned in to take a look. He was still motionless, prone and clearly dead, but somehow as she leaned over his prone form Mel felt a childish, silly conviction that he would sit up and grab her by the throat.

He did no such thing, of course. Janice was right, and she knew what she was doing. Bending a little closer, blinking under the glare of the truck’s headlamps, Mel saw with absolute certainty that he would never sit up again.

There were at least four holes in him, and those were just the ones she could see at a glance. Two in his head, dead-eye shots clean between the eyes, and another two through his belly. The pool beneath him was vast, a lake of the same tar-like blood she saw coming out of Janice. Mel fell backwards, staggered and sickened; she had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from shrieking herself hoarse. Seeing and tending a gunshot wound was one thing; seeing a mass of them all coming together to leave a man dead was something else entirely. Another lesson she’d never imagined she would have to learn.

She tried to turn away, but she couldn’t. She could not move at all. She heard her own voice choke out “Lord have mercy” another half-dozen times, and then—

“Melinda!”

—and then, out of nowhere Janice was right there by her side. She couldn’t have been subtle about her approach, stomping around as she was wont to do, but still somehow Mel hadn’t heard it at all.

“You…”

“Later!” Janice snapped, grabbing her roughly by the arm. “Christ’s sake, Melinda, let’s go!”

But she lacked the strength to drag her away, and Mel could not have moved on her own even if she’d wanted to. She was utterly frozen.

“My goodness,” she whispered. “Did you really do all that?”

Janice huffed out an impatient, angry sigh. “You see anyone else around here?”

“Janice…” Her voice shook, but the rest of her body was suddenly very still. “Janice, that fella has a good half-dozen holes in him.”

“No.” She was swaying again, turning even paler with the effort of standing up. “No, don’t be stupid. There’s only half a dozen bullets in my damn gun, and I’m not that good a shot.”

“Now who’s arguing semantics?” Mel countered. She was getting angry too, driven into an uncharacteristic frenzy by the sight of all that blood. “My goodness, Janice, would you look at him?”

“No.”

“Janice…”

“ _No_.”

“Janice, you slaughtered him!”

“So what? He would’ve slaughtered both of us too, given half the chance.”

Her breath was lodged in her throat, rattling raggedly as she tried to push it out, but her voice was as clear as a bell. She was trying to be soft, at least by her usual standards, trying to explain things as kindly as she could, but it wasn’t really working. Mel wondered if she was even capable of those things. Softness, kindness… they seemed a thousand miles away from the woman she’d come to know.

“That’s not an excuse,” she said. “You can’t just…”

“Look.” Janice lurched on her feet, violently enough that Mel had to reach out and steady her. “I know it ain’t pretty. Hell, I remember the first time I saw some sucker bleed to death in front of me. It’s…” She shook her head, a shade or two paler for the remembering, then rushed on as though she could banish the horror for both of them. “But he shot first. Okay? _He shot first_.”

Mel forced herself to focus on that. “And why, pray tell, did he do that?”

Janice shut her eyes tight, and kept them shut for so long that Mel started to worry she wouldn’t open them again. She’d regained some measure of her balance now, at least, though Mel had a feeling that was just because she didn’t want to seem weak by leaning on someone weaker than she was.

Simply put, she didn’t look good at all. The bandage was holding for the time being, the surface still white and mostly clean, but it was pretty obvious that the pain and loss of blood were getting to her. Her arm was strapped to keep it still, bound at an angle across her chest by a crude makeshift sling, and that restricted her movement a lot; every now and then she’d touch the thing with her free hand, and her lips would twist hatefully. She felt broken, Mel could tell, and vulnerable.

When she finally opened her eyes again, they were bleary and unfocused, like she’d just woken from a dream.

“Smythe was a big man,” she said. She was speaking to Mel, but she didn’t seem to really see her. “And I don’t mean he was tall. You think his people wouldn’t come after him?”

Mel’s jaw dropped a little. “You saying we’re on the run?”

“Technically,” Janice shrugged, “I’m saying _‘who the hell is gonna believe an ancient god rose up from a cursed tomb and gutted the bastard?’_.” It was a fair point, Mel supposed, if somewhat overblown. “They knew he was after me, and they knew where I was holed up. They’ll have found what’s left of the dig site by now, put some of the pieces together, figured they’ve got the whole story. Our little rivalry ain’t exactly a secret, you know?” She sighed, heavy and regretful, if just for a second. “They’ve probably been tailing us ever since we swung through town to pick up your stuff.”

Mel opened her mouth, then shut it again, feeling inexplicably responsible. She couldn’t have known, of course, but that didn’t help much when Janice was glaring at her like everything was her fault.

“Oh my,” she mustered. “I’m… sorry?”

Janice rolled her uninjured shoulder. It wasn’t a shrug this time, just a dismissal. “It’ll be fine,” she said, in the tired, bored voice of someone who had done this a few thousand times before. “We dodge his bloodhounds, find some quiet little spot to lay low for a few days. They’ll figure we booked it back to the States and call it a loss. Give it a week or so, we’ll be free and clear.”

“A week or so…” Mel echoed, dazed. “Now, are you telling me—”

“Melinda.” She swerved again, looking punch-drunk. No doubt all the chitchat was wearing her out. “We ain’t safe yet, okay? That bastard won’t be the only one, and if we don’t get moving they’ll find us sooner rather than later.”

“Are you sure?”

“Goddammit, _yes_.” She took a breath, seemingly to cool her temper. “Look. Mel. I said it before and I’ll say it again: you wanna jump ship once we’re out of the hot water, knock yourself out. We hole up some place safe until this all blows over, then you can walk away and we won’t ever have to see each other again. If that’s what you want, it’s just fine with me. But right now… Jesus Christ, right now I’m Public Enemy Number One, and I don’t have enough shoulders for another goddamn free-for-all.” She turned away, flushing just a little. “Now, are you coming or not?”

Mel glanced back at the body. Did Janice really expect her to just turn around and walk away like none of this ever happened? “There’s four holes in him, Janice. _Four_. And that’s just the ones I can see from here.”

“Had to be sure.” Her voice broke, though, the shadows of past nightmares shimmering dangerously in the cracks. “Dammit, you don’t understand. I hope to Christ you never do. Because this… you can’t stop. Not until they stay down. Not until it’s over, and sometimes not even then. You can’t stop. You can’t ever, _ever_ …”

“Janice…”

“You _can’t_.” She was shuddering. The silly old hat might be doing a swell job of keeping her face hidden, but even it couldn’t mask the wetness in her eyes. “Hesitating, second guessing… it’ll get you worse than dead.”

Mel shook her head, though a part of her knew that it was true. Janice’s situation would have been a whole lot worse, she knew, if she hadn’t shot back. Mel didn’t want to think about that, though, and she certainly didn’t want to think about how much worse her own situation would have been if her only companion had faded away and left her all on her lonesome. 

There were a great many things she didn’t want to think about, quite frankly, most of which she couldn’t even have conceived of twenty-four hours ago. _Is this what my life is going to be from here on out? A mess of blood and fear and dead bodies? Heaven preserve me if it is._

She looked back at Janice, found her still shaking. “You gotta stop some time,” she said, very quietly. “You can’t keep going forever.”

Janice turned away with her whole body. “We gotta go,” she said. “Now.”

Mel took a long last look at the poor old corpse. He surely wasn’t going anywhere, and Janice made a decent point when she said that he was the one who’d shot first. If he’d just kept his own darn gun holstered… well, now, he’d be alive and well, wouldn’t he? He’d be on his way home to his family, wherever they were, and Janice’s shoulder would be in one piece. He was the one who’d pushed her to this, who’d given her no darn choice. Who wouldn’t take that shot if they’d been wounded first?

Still, though, true as she knew it was, her better instincts couldn’t abide the thought of leaving him out here to rot. He may have been cruel, but he was still a man. Weren’t she and Janice supposed to be human too?

“They’ll know you done it,” she said to Janice. She had to say something, had to try one last time, and she flattered herself that she understood the Covington mindscape well enough to know that compassion wasn’t the way to go. “The more bodies you leave lying around out here, the more rope they got to hang you with.”

Janice laughed hoarsely, and did not turn back. “So let ’em hang me,” she said. “At least it’ll be quick and clean. Christ, don’t I deserve that much?”

Mel was sure she’d never heard anything quite so tragic in all her life.

“Now, I’m sure you don’t mean that,” she chided gently. “You just—”

“ _Mel_.” There it was again, those devastating nightmare cracks in her voice. “If it’s so damn important to wash your conscience clean, you can do it on the road. But I have to get out of here, _now_. Do you hear me? I have to go, and I…” She choked, looking suddenly very young and very frightened. “I can’t do it alone.”

“But—”

“I can’t drive like this. Hell, I can’t even draw my damn gun. I…” Goodness, she really was scared. “Mel, I’m _clipped_. You can drop me any time you want once this is over. Just say the word and I’ll be outta your hair. I swear it. But please… for the love of whatever god you got… please, don’t do it now.”

Mel sighed. At long last, and with a reluctance that never quite faded, she turned away from the body.

“I said never,” she said, “and that’s what I meant.”

Janice’s whole body slumped. Given the situation it was difficult to tell whether it was pain, exhaustion, or relief, but Mel let herself imagine it was the latter. _Thank you, thank God, thank you._

“Good.” Her voice was clear now, lacking the fear that had wracked it just a moment ago. She sounded like herself again, strong and so much older than she was. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Mel took a few deep breaths. The world suddenly seemed very large, and she just the smallest part of it. She thought briefly of Xena, and tried to conjure up a vision of Janice as she appeared through the eyes of a warrior princess. A little less like Xena herself and a little more like Gabrielle, the bard that Xena wanted so badly to believe her lover’s descendant still was.

It was strange, and so very sad. Janice had spent so much of her life desperately seeking Xena; it was all she could see, the one and only thing she wanted for herself. But Mel _was_ Xena, or she had been for a spell, and she knew better. Janice wasn’t supposed to be like her; she was supposed to be be soft and sweet, filled with love and kindness and songs, not broken and angry and scarred. Xena was so proud to see Gabrielle’s family live on so far in the future, but Mel had the burden of looking a little closer, of seeing both Gabrielle and Janice for who they really were. It was a heartbreaking place to be.

Maybe it was her place to set things right, she thought sadly. Maybe she could be the one to put Gabrielle’s descendant on the right path, the path that would make both of their ancestors happy. Maybe it was Xena’s turn to be the patient one, to be kind and soft and compassionate. Janice was so violent, so rough and jagged; Mel didn’t understand what could drive a woman to fill someone with more bullets than he had limbs, but Xena did, and she understood too that Gabrielle’s compassion was every bit as powerful as Janice’s anger. Between the two of them, maybe they could do some good.

Mel closed her eyes for a moment. She drowned out the world around her, the blood-soaked gravel and the hole-riddled body; she blocked out everything she could, everything but Xena’s perfect vision of Gabrielle, the breathtaking, soulful young woman that she’d remembered when she looked at Janice. Mel had to cling to that, had to remember that it was still there, still hiding beneath the violence and the pain and the blood. No-one else could bring it out of her; no-one else even knew that it was there. That was her gift, hers alone, and she would not reject it.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

*


	2. Chapter 2

*

Mel was just as dreadful a driver as she anticipated.

Not that it was entirely her fault, in fairness. She’d never tried, after all, and in any case extreme panic and a wounded teacher did not make for an ideal learning environment. Janice sat shivering in the shotgun seat, barking instructions through chattering teeth; she did as well as her limited patience allowed, but it was like trying to teach a fish to ride a bicycle. Even notwithstanding her lack of experience, Mel simply had no aptitude for it.

Besides, keeping her eyes on the road was a constant struggle. With Janice sitting next to her in such a terrible state, all Mel wanted to do was stare at her and will her to get better. She was growing paler by the minute, trembling like her bones were splitting at the seams, and her voice sounded like something from beyond the grave. Mel was acutely aware of the fact that her lack of talent was all that stood between Janice and whatever lurked on the other side of all that blood; how in the world was she supposed to focus on the dang pedals when the stakes were as high as all that? How could anyone?

When they’d been back on the road maybe twenty minutes minutes or so, Mel turned in her seat and said, “We need to get you to a hospital.”

“No.” Janice had her eyes clenched shut. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, but apparently that silly ego of hers overpowered even the pain. “We can’t afford it.”

Mel sighed. “Well, now, if it’s the money you’re worried about…”

“Forget the money. Jesus, why is it always about the damn money?”

Her voice rose as she said that, not just in pitch but in volume too, twisting into something crude and corrugated. Mel remembered how angry she got back at the dig site when Jack Kleinman and Smythe accused her of taking after her money-grabbing father. It was clearly a very personal and very sensitive subject for her, if not the money itself then at least its associations.

Mel had some measure of sympathy for that. Not empathy, of course — by her own admission she’d never had to work a day in her life — but at the very least a kind of compassion. It couldn’t be easy, carrying that albatross around her neck, and she understood that Janice’s feelings about her father were complicated at best. Still, though, she wasn’t about to let stubborn familial pride get in the way of what needed to be done.

“Well, then, what is it?” she pressed. “You’re shot, for pity’s sake. You need someone more qualified than me to fix it.”

Janice opened her eyes, for the sole purpose of glaring at her.

“Let me worry about that,” she said. “All you have to do is drive.”

“You need someone better than me to drive this jalopy too…”

“ _Melinda_.”

On Janice’s tongue, Mel’s name became a kind of punctuation mark, an end to whatever conversation she didn’t like. Once again, it stripped Mel of her autonomy, her right to speak, and left her with nothing to do but sigh and shake her head.

She wondered briefly if Xena ever had this sort of trouble communicating with Gabrielle. Probably not, given what she knew about them. Far more likely, it was Gabrielle who struggled to communicate with Xena. Strange, she thought, how the mirror of history could become so cracked and changed.

Bardic ancestry or no, it was Xena that Janice saw in herself, Xena she’d spent her whole life trying to emulate, Xena whose name she wrapped around herself like a bandage. Like Xena, Janice was angry and violent, stubborn and untalkative; they both walked with one fist in front of them and the other on their weapons, both assumed that someone was always hiding just around the corner with a grudge and a knife. Every breath was a challenge, every word a struggle, and every movement a block-and-counter waiting to happen.

Mel hadn’t looked through the scrolls yet, couldn’t know for sure how all those points touched in Xena’s relationship with Gabrielle, but she’d had Xena’s soul in contact with her own and she didn’t need that old parchment to understand how much all that violence could weigh. Hours later, and after only the most fleeting contact, she could still feel it crushing her ribs.

 _How long has the world been your enemy,_ she wondered, glancing at Janice with misty eyes. _As long as it was hers? Do I got enough poetry in me to show you that it doesn’t always have to be that way?_

“You know,” she said out loud, “she’d be the first one to tell you there’s nothing to gain from being too darn stubborn to get yourself fixed up proper-like.”

She didn’t need to clarify who _‘she’_ was, of course. Janice’s body went tight as a rope, every inch of her set aflame with recognition and a tragic, predictable resistance.

“And how the hell would you know?”

“I know her,” Mel reminded her, pushing ever so gently. “I _was_ her, Janice. And I know that it weren’t all fun and games for her.”

“Ain’t much fun for me either,” Janice said.

Mel sighed. “She was smart, though. You think she would’ve lived long enough to make a name for herself if she was half as stubborn and reckless as you?”

“Maybe she just healed faster,” Janice said, and shut her eyes again.

Mel took advantage of that to get a good look at her. Janice was breathing strangely, the air stuttering in her chest like film stuck in an old projector, and she had her head thrown back against the headrest. Her lips were shaking, her jaw clenching and unclenching in juddering little spasms, trying in vain to ease the chattering of her teeth. She was freezing cold, Mel could tell, and her skin was clammy to the touch.

Mel didn’t know much about the dangers of gunshot wounds, but she surely knew that those things put together weren’t good. She wanted to pull over, dig around for a blanket to warm her, but she knew that Janice would tear her a new one just for thinking about it.

And so, because she couldn’t do anything else, she gave up and drove.

There it was again, that darn obedience of hers. It was so much easier to bow her back than to stand up straight, better to be safe than to risk rejection or humiliation or worse. Those were her fears, shame and social awkwardness; how shallow she felt now, next to a woman whose body was a patchwork of pain, who carried the earth in her voice and the stars in her eyes.

Mel always did what was expected of her. Even now, it seemed. This world was so different from the one she’d come from, and yet here she was, unchanged in spite of herself. She’d come out here on a whim and a prayer, taken a deep breath and leapt off the precipice into the unknown; how bold she’d thought herself at the time. But as soon as she arrived, the waters grew murky, and the world she found was nothing at all like the one she’d imagined. She had no idea what monsters lurked at the bottom, and she wasn’t brave enough to find out. So, instead, just as she always did back home, she bowed her back and obeyed.

The truck rattled and groaned as it tore up the road. Mel knew even less about engines than she did about gunshot wounds, but the poor thing sounded about as unhealthy as Janice. The seat juddered underneath her, and the wheel was stiff and increasingly unresponsive every time she tried to turn it. She prayed the poor thing would not become another casualty of their bad luck, but a part of her could tell already that it was wishful thinking.

After a long spell of silence and worry, she blurted out, “You sure we can’t take a little break?”

“I’m sure,” Janice said. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. “Keep going until I say you can stop.”

Well, Mel knew that wouldn’t happen any time soon. _Weren’t it just a little while earlier you said to me ‘you can’t ever stop’? Who do you think you’re fooling, Doctor?_

Aloud, she only had the courage to say, “What if I get sleepy?”

“You slept before.”

“For maybe ten minutes.”

Janice huffed. “Long enough.”

Mel took one hand off the wheel to massage her throbbing temples. How in the world was she supposed to have a sensible discussion with someone so darn bloody-minded? It seemed sometimes that Janice was opposed to common sense almost as a point of principle. It was like she couldn’t comprehend it, and so, much like everything else that was beyond her understanding, she simply pretended it did not exist.

“Well, now…” Mel said, slow and careful-like, knowing perfectly well that she was poking at a beehive. “We can’t all run on caffeine and pessimism for weeks on end.”

Janice actually laughed at that. Hoarse and croaky, but with real humour. “Bet you could if you tried.”

“I declare I could not.” Relieved though she was at hearing Janice laugh, Mel couldn’t keep from sighing. “You might be a goddess among mortals, Doctor Covington, but I’m no such thing. A lady needs her rest.”

“A lady needs a swift kick up the ass,” Janice threw back, a little rusty from the laughter. “I told you already: we can’t afford to stop.”

“Come, now,” Mel said. “We’ve not seen hide nor hair of another living soul in…” She faltered, briefly unsure. “Well, hours, I’m sure…”

“Nice try,” Janice said, then shook her head. “Drive.”

“My goodness, but you’re stubborn.” Mel took a couple of deep, cleansing breaths, more to calm her rising frustration this time than steady her nerves. “But now… hypothetically speaking, mind you… what would you do if I just up and stopped? You said it yourself: you can’t drive. Heck, you can’t even threaten me with that silly little pistol of yours—”

“Revolver,” Janice snapped. Because of course that was the important part. “It’s a revolver.”

“Well, isn’t that the same…” She trailed off, realising she was being baited, and flushed crimson because she’d let it happen. “Now, that’s not the point, and you know it. Point is, it’s no darn use to you with your arm all out of commission like that. So what’s to stop me from just pulling this thing over right here and taking a little nap?”

“We’d be caught,” Janice said, like it really was as simple as that. “You don’t want that, believe me.”

Her teeth were still chattering, the words slurred almost to incoherence, but there was an air of calm in the way she looked up at her that sent a chill down Mel’s spine. It was almost as though she’d moved beyond sensation, beyond thought, beyond anything but the basics of survival. Mel wasn’t sure she could believe anything she said in such a state, but goodness, she made it hard not to.

“You’re really sure about that?” she asked.

“Yeah, I am.” Janice looked her in the eye, as steadily as she could given the circumstances. _Try me,_ she seemed to be saying. _Let’s see if your idealism beats my experience_. “Bullet through the brain if you’re lucky, you’ll be dead before you even knew it was happening. Or maybe they’ll miss and catch you somewhere else, somewhere not so quick and clean. They get you in the gut, you’ll be dying for days. Bleed out real slow, real painful. Or maybe—”

“You’ve made your point.” Mel felt herself turn white. “Why’d you have to be so graphic?”

“Because that’s what it’s like.” Janice swallowed a couple of times, as though she’d affected herself nearly as much as Mel. “That’s the reality of it, Mel. Life out here… it’s blood and death and pain, and the sooner you get that through your spoiled, privileged little brain…”

“…the sooner I get the message and leave you on your lonesome?” Angry and upset, Mel shook her head. “You’re just so desperate for me to up and walk away, aren’t you? So desperate to be a gosh-darn martyr.”

“Ain’t about being a martyr,” Janice said, bristling at the word. “I just don’t want to drag you down with me. The places I go ain’t places for a ‘lady’.” She sighed. “You’re too soft for this kind of living, Melinda. Too damn soft to get torn up and twisted inside. You’re not ready for the sorts of things a woman has to go through out here. And you’re sure as hell not ready for the sorts of things we have to do to survive.”

“Like what?” Mel asked, though she had some idea already. “Like putting four bullets through one man?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

Mel studied her long and hard. There was more flickering under the surface, but she was too afraid to ask about it. Better stick to what she knew, what she’d seen for herself. As for the rest… well, assuming they both made it through the night, there’d be plenty of time to drag that out of her. For now, at least, she had more important things to worry about. Things like—

“You’re shivering,” she said. “And turning blue.”

“I’ve got a goddamn hole in me.” True though it was, still somehow she made it sound sullen and moody. “Christ’s sake, Mel, I’d say I’m doing pretty damn well, all things considered. I’m still breathing, ain’t I? Still stringing sentences together. I’m _good_.”

“And what if you stop being good?” Mel blurted out, feeling the panic surge. “What if you stop stringing sentences together before we get to wherever we’re headed?”

She was terrified. The realisation landed only after she said the words, as she heard them echo back to her and realised that they might yet become truth. She had been frightened before, of course, but this was different; this paralysed her, left her breathless and dizzy and made her want to faint.

She had no idea what to do. She’d never had to tend a bullet wound before, had never needed to look into someone’s face and figure out if they were coherent, if they were sickening or dying. She didn’t know where they were going, or even really where they were, and she barely had the first idea of what was happening around her. She didn’t know a darn thing, frankly, except that Janice was supposed to be her guide, her tether and her sanity; Janice was the one grounding her, keeping her focused, showing her how the world worked out here. Janice was the only one of them who knew anything about anything, the only thing Mel had, and if she really did stop being ‘good’…

 _No._ It didn’t bear thinking about. Even just the idea was enough to drive all the air straight out of her.

She could obey orders. She could do what she was told, whether she agreed with it or not. She could drive the truck for as long as she had Janice to point out which pedal did what. She could clean and bind that awful wound for as long as Janice was there to tell her how much and how tight. She could just about hold her quaking body in one piece while she did all those things, could just about hold the panic and the dread inside, but only for as long as she had Janice to keep her focused.

She didn’t know what she’d do if Janice dropped out on her, if she lost consciousness or lost her life; forget being good, Mel just needed her _there_. Janice was right about her: she was not ready to survive out here all on her lonesome.

Janice, of course, didn’t want to hear any of that. No doubt it cut a little too close to the truth she was trying to ignore, the part of her that looked away and blanched when Mel asked if it was bad. That she bristled and glared and got angry… well, that was a warning sign all on its own.

“Stop fussing,” she was saying, but her teeth were chattering so hard that Mel could be forgiven for not understanding. “I’m not a kid, okay? I’ve taken more bullets than you’ve had hot meals, so stop pretending you know what you’re doing. Stop pretending you know anything about any of this, and just do the one thing I’m asking you to.”

“Janice…”

“ _Drive_ , God damn you!”

So she did. Lord have mercy, what else could she do?

*

Some time later, seemingly of its own accord, the truck ground to a halt.

Mel blinked, then frowned. She hadn’t let her foot up off the pedal for at least half an hour, perhaps even more; the last time she dared try, Janice darn near tore her arms out of their sockets. She hadn’t accidentally nudged the stick either, she was sure, or hit any buttons or levers, or done any of the half-dozen other things that might qualify as ‘experimentation’. That was a lesson she only needed to learn once, after an ill-advised _“I wonder what this does…”_ ended with a blast of the horn loud enough to rouse the dead from their graves and a string of blasphemy from Janice crude enough to send them running straight back.

She started cursing now, too, though it lacked the effect of the last time. She sounded rusty, and when she sat up straight in her seat it was with the unbalanced grogginess of someone halfway asleep.

“The hell?” she croaked. “Dammit, Mel, I told you…”

“Wasn’t me,” Mel said, cutting her off before the raging could start. It didn’t quite count as taking a stand, she supposed, but at least it was a step in the right direction. “Darn thing just… stopped dead.”

Janice growled, irritated. “I don’t think so.”

Mel had to bite down to keep from chuckling at that. Had she known this would happen, she could probably have laid a wager on predicting Janice’s response word-for-word. She didn’t know much about the woman, at least nothing much below than the sullen surface, but any fool could see she didn’t like being told things that weren’t in keeping with her plans.

“Well, see for yourself,” Mel said, waving a hand at the dashboard in the vain hope that it would explain things more effectively than she could.

Janice made a dangerous sound in her throat, then stretched forward to see. She was moving very stiffly, as though all her limbs had gone to sleep and did not appreciate being woken, and when she studied the dashboard it was with a pained, drunken squint. The dials and numbers were dark, and it was a challenge to make them all out under the dim reflected moonlight; Mel took advantage of her preoccupation to shuffle in a little closer and steal a subtle, sneaky look at the bandage.

“Don’t bother,” Janice grunted, because apparently Mel’s efforts were neither subtle nor sneaky enough. “I know it’s bleeding again.”

Mel felt a wave of fresh panic, cold as an avalanche. “And how long’s it been doing that for?”

“Not very.”

That was a lie. The truth was written all over her face, as clear as anything. Mel sighed, frustration tainting the panic if only for a moment. “And why in the world didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it’s not important.” Another lie. Her fingers twitched against the dashboard, tapping out the truth in code. “And I knew you’d insist that we stop so you could take a look and cluck over it.”

Mel rolled her eyes, and counted to ten. Very slowly. Three times. It did not help at all.

“Well, all right, then,” she said when she trusted herself to speak again without saying something they’d both regret. “But seeing as how we’re stopped now anyway, how’s about you sit back and let me—”

“Gotta be the engine,” Janice muttered. She was making a show of pretending she hadn’t heard, but Mel didn’t buy it for a second; Janice was only fractionally better at being subtle and sneaky than she was. “Stay in the truck. Keep your head down, keep to the shadows as best you can, and keep an eye out for trouble. You see or hear anything suspicious, holler.”

Mel squeaked, alarmed. “Janice, no.”

“What, you want to do it?” She barked a laugh, cool but not really cruel, and frowned at her. “The hell do you know about engines?”

“Not a darn thing,” Mel said quietly. “But I reckon I do know what ‘bleeding again’ means. And I know that you—”

“Jesus Christ.” Janice slumped back in her seat, as though trying to summon enough strength to climb out. “Leave it alone, will ya?"

Ignoring her, Mel leaned in to study the dark stain spreading from the middle of the bandage. It wasn’t very large just yet, and it didn’t look particularly gruesome, but still the sight of it set her heart racing anew, her thoughts spiralling into a maelstrom of images she did not want and could not shake, each more nightmarish than the last. She saw Janice bleeding to death right there in front of her, saw herself turning away and then turning back a moment later to find her choking on her own blood, a pool of the stuff oozing all over that worn old leather seat. She couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control the horror as it leaped higher, and in the back of her mind she could stop herself from thinking, _well, I reckon she’s just about selfish enough to do it, too._

“Don’t,” she heard herself whimper. “Pity’s sake, Janice, don’t…”

She didn’t need to say any more. Janice, in a moment of rare compassion, found her hand and squeezed. “Ain’t gonna happen,” she said firmly. “You hear me?”

“You’re bleeding,” Mel choked. “ _Again_. You’re gonna—”

“No, I’m not.” Janice closed her eyes for a moment. Mel let her fingers slip out of her grasp and down to her wrist, finding her pulse and catching its rhythm. Janice did not stop her. “Look. I know you don’t know me real well just yet, but you’ve got to believe me when I tell you I’m not that much of a masochist. Sure, I have my moments, but this…” She shook her head, then blinked dizzily. “I’m not putting my life on the line just to be difficult. I’m not gonna lie to you just so you don’t think I’m weak. Jesus, I’m not an idiot.”

Mel tried to laugh, but it came out like a sob. “I reckon you are.”

Janice did laugh. It wasn’t particularly strong, but at least she managed it; that was more than Mel could say for herself, and with no darn bullet wound to blame for it.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “So maybe I am an idiot. But I know what I’m doing here, okay? I’ve been in this situation before, and without you or anyone else around to patch me up.” She wet her lips, and Mel stared at them. “Listen. I’ll go check the engine, get us up and running, and then I’ll let you change the bandage again. Deal?” She forced a tight, weary smile. “Just need to put a little more pressure on it, pull it a little tighter. That’s all.”

“Or burn it closed.”

They both choked at that. Janice, somewhat understandably, was floored by the notion that Mel knew enough about bleeding gunshot wounds to suggest such a thing, and Mel… well, frankly, Mel _didn’t_ know enough about bleeding gunshot wounds to suggest such a thing. She had no idea where the words had come from, and she couldn’t explain the terrible vision that came with them. It came on like an itch in the back of her brain, like recalling a dream so long after waking that she couldn’t be sure it really was a dream at all, the echo of something intangible made solid by the passage of time.

Deeply unsettled, she tried to dismiss it, but it would not be sent away. It had become a part of her now, a new-old experience that she couldn’t unremember.

 _Xena_ , she realised, with a certainty that scared her.

Janice frowned, first at Mel and then at down the wet bandage. “Yeah,” she said, in a low voice. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

So saying, she straightened her spine and climbed out of the truck.

Mel watched her go in silence. She felt dizzy again, faint and queasy like she did when she saw the wound for the first time, when her own blood started rushing to her head at the sight of Janice’s, when she was so darn worried that she would pass out before she could do what Janice needed her to. There was so much blood, so black and thick and endless, all pouring from that tiny little hole.

Mel had never seen anything like it before in her life; she felt broken, but Janice, shaking right down to her bones, was as calm as anything. She didn’t even miss a beat, talking Mel through it every step of the way just like she promised she would, keeping her head up and her voice clear. She didn’t falter for even a second, didn’t flinch at all. She was incredible.

Mel couldn’t say the same for herself. She flinched back then, and she flinched again now, struck by terrible memories that were not her own, shimmering spectres of a day countless centuries ago, a haze of sunshine and overpowering heat.

It was the height of summer, she recalled, and Janice — no, not Janice, _Gabrielle_ — had been struck by an arrow. The circumstances were very different, but the hole looked almost exactly the same. It was her left shoulder, not her right; she remembered that as well, because that meant it was more dangerous. Xena knew, but she didn’t tell Gabrielle. Mel remembered how ill she felt when the bleeding didn’t stop, not because it was blood but because it was Gabrielle’s.

She had to burn it. The thought had come in an sickening flash to Xena, and it came just as hard to Mel now, even after so very long. It made her whole body go limp, the memory so keen and so complete that if she closed her eyes and shut out the world she was certain she could still feel the heat from the fire, could still smell the smoke and the sizzling, searing flesh; she could still hear Gabrielle screaming, too, short and high and beautifully brave.

The memory wasn’t her own, of course. She knew that. But the _fear_ …

Shuddering, she scrambled out of the truck. She had never felt so desperate in her life, so much in need of a moment’s contact, a reminder no matter how superficial or stupid that their shared history was not about to repeat itself here, that she wouldn’t turn around in an hour or two and find Janice wracked with delirium, in the throes of some poison-induced confession that she didn’t understand, that she wouldn’t come within a breath’s reach of losing her like Xena almost lost Gabrielle.

“Janice!” she cried, unable to keep all those feelings from touching her voice, her hands, her everything. “Doctor Covington!”

Janice was bent double, hunched over the truck’s engine with a lamp in her good hand. The light trembled slightly, dancing over the gears and motors, and Mel tried not to wonder what it meant that Janice’s iron grip couldn’t even hold the darn thing steady.

 _Tell me you’re all right,_ she thought urgently. _Tell me you’re just useless with your left hand. Tell me you just get nervous in the dark. Heck, you could tell me motor oil gives you the shivers for all I care. Just tell me you’re okay._

Trembling hands or no, Janice’s reflexes were just as keen as ever. She bolted upright at the sound of her name, quick as lightning, dropping the lamp and drawing her whip. It came up high and fast, no less deadly for being in her off-hand — _so much for the ‘useless left’ theory!_ — and Mel was just about to brace for impact when Janice realised who she was.

“Mel!” She spat the name like a curse, then relaxed and lowered the whip. “I thought I told you to stay in the damn truck! My god, you’re lucky I don’t shoot on sight.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Mel said, sounding much calmer than she felt. “Even if you could’ve pulled that silly old gun. You still need me behind the wheel.”

“I’d manage,” Janice muttered, rolling her eyes. She swore a couple of times, then slipped the whip back onto her belt with obvious effort. “Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t,” Mel promised, then picked up the lamp and handed it back. Janice took it with a scowl. “Figured anything out?”

Janice shrugged, grunted out a few more choice curses, then bent back over the engine. “Starter’s dead,” she said, in the casual, too-clever manner of someone who secretly didn’t have a clue. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Rather than pointing out the crack in her tone, Mel asked, “You know this stuff?”

“Know enough to know we’re dead in the damn water,” Janice shot back, sulking.

“I…” Mel blinked at the engine, then sighed and conceded that she was in no better position to judge the darn thing. “Well, now, that’s a shame.”

“Dammit.” Eyes squeezed shut, Janice took a couple of deep breaths, then shoved the lamp at Mel and slammed her palm down onto the chassis, again and again and again, until the metal started to creak and bend. “ _Dammit_!”

“Take it easy,” Mel chided, though she knew perfectly well that it would do no good. Talking sense to Janice when she was in this sort of mood was about as effective as talking to a brick wall, and with rather more chance of toppling. “You won’t do no-one no good if you gotta get your good hand strapped as well.”

Unsurprisingly, the words bounced right off her. She pounded the truck another half-dozen times, spitting and swearing and snarling, and only stopped when she wore herself out. Mel had never even heard half the words that came out of her mouth, and she was fairly sure that some of them weren’t actually words at all. She made a note to look them up if they ever got out of this mess.

When she’d finally driven herself to exhaustion Janice dropped down into a crouch, head hanging down between her knees, breathing heavily.

“Piece of junk,” she wheezed. “Goddamn useless son of a…”

“Now, Janice.” Mel crouched as well, laying one hand on Janice’s good shoulder and holding up the lamp with the other to throw some light on the bad one. “You’re bleeding again, in case you done forgot. So why don’t you take it easy before you do yourself a mischief no amount of booze or bandages will make good?”

Janice shook her head. Her face was slick with sweat. “I…”

“Hush, will you? You said you’re not a fool. Now how ’bout you prove it?”

Still frustrated, but too exhausted to argue, Janice conceded. “You remember what to do?”

Mel did not. But Xena did.

*

Changing the bandage was pretty simple, though they both knew it wouldn’t be enough.

The bullet holes, front and back, were dark and drenched. Mel wanted to touch one, to see if it was hot, but Janice swatted her hand away before she could get close enough, no doubt remembering the last time she went poking around there. She was in a sour, violent mood, scowling and muttering and insisting that she was doing fine, that it was healing well, that it was only bleeding a small tiny little bit. Mel wasn’t entirely convinced, and the evidence to the contrary was pretty darn compelling, but she didn’t mention it because the truth was frightening and the lies made her feel safe.

“You got an odd colour to you,” she said, as conversational as she could manage as she prepared the fresh bandage. She doubted Janice was in any mood to chat, but she needed a distraction. “Feeling a little green?”

Janice thinned her lips, annoyed at both the small-talk and the subject.

“No,” she said, then swallowed convulsively and gave herself away.

Mel snorted, more amused than worried for once. “Now, now,” she chided, “who’s the darn fool who said she wouldn’t lie to stop me thinking she was weak?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She was smiling as she said it, though. Well, almost-smiling, at any rate, and the sight of it made Mel want to hug her. It didn’t mean much, that forced smugness, but it did mean that Janice was strong enough to pull it off, strong enough to pretend that she was stronger still. It meant that she was still herself, or at least the version of herself she wanted Mel to see, the smirking sharp-toothed adventurer who had sauntered in at just the perfect moment to save her from a tent full of goons and guns. It meant a whole darn lot.

Notwithstanding its odd colour, Janice’s skin was much paler now than it was the last time they did this. The first bandage had seemed very white, standing out starkly against the tan of her shoulder; this one barely stood out at all. Mel flattened her palm over the gauze as it settled, and tried not to picture too vividly the angry wound beneath. She wondered how long this one would last before it started to stain as well, and she wondered how pale Janice’s skin would be the next time they did this.

Seeming to sense her concern, Janice sighed and covered Mel’s hand with her own, the good one. Less good now, it looked bruised and sore after its disagreement with the truck’s chassis. Mel searched her knuckles for swelling, and wished that she didn’t understand the impulse as well as she did. This tendency for self-inflicted pain, for punishing herself when the world did her wrong… it should have been incomprehensible to someone like Mel. In a small corner of her heart, it still was, but Xena understood the urge very well and her voice whispered in Mel’s head, explaining how it felt in excruciating detail.

_She just wants to control something. Even if it’s just her own pain. Surely you can understand that._

Mel wasn’t sure she did, but the longer she thought about it the more sense it seemed to make. Unnerved, she wondered if she would always be able to tell the difference, if she would always be able to pick out the parts of her that weren’t really _her_. How could she know for sure, which thoughts were Xena’s and which were her own when they both shared the same space? If it kept happening, what was to keep her from losing herself completely, from becoming the things Xena made her remember? How much longer could she bask in the innocence of not understanding?

In a bid at recapturing her attention, Janice gave her hand a sharp squeeze. “See?” she said, pressing Mel’s palm down on the bandage. “Nothing to worry about.”

Mel tried to smile, but she couldn’t. “All the same,” she said, “I think I’ll worry anyway.”

Janice stiffened, and her skin turned another odd colour. “Don’t say things like that,” she said, sounding haunted.

“Why not?” Mel asked. She let her hand slide down just a touch, finding warm skin at the edge of the bandage. Janice’s breathing was rough in her chest, her pulse thready and quick. Mel could feel it all, and it took a great deal of effort not to let it devour her completely. “You keep landing yourself in trouble, getting shot and battering your own darn hands, someone’s gotta worry about you.”

“No, they don’t.” It sounded like a whimper, like a sob, like she was close to tears. “Goddammit, _you_ don’t!”

Mel frowned. She recognised that this was another sensitive subject, painful like money or her daddy’s reputation, like so many things Mel herself had never given a second thought. It struck her with a strange kind of sadness, the way Janice reacted to those things, reeling like she’d been punched square in the stomach. Mel could not comprehend how someone could be so full of pride that even abstract ideas could make her feel so vulnerable.

This one — _compassion_ — made about as much sense as the rest, really. Growing up as she had under her windmill-tilting daddy, a man hell-bent on unearthing a Holy Grail that nobody else ever believed in… well, it wasn’t the kind of life that bred receptiveness to sweet feelings. Mel didn’t know very much about Harry Covington, but she could well imagine what it must have been like for a someone his world. What a childhood Janice must have had, her only company an obsessed, amoral man; with no mother to tip the balance and bring her home, was it any wonder she’d turned out so resistant to softness?

That explained a lot too. Janice hadn’t told Melinda anything more than she felt she’d earned the right to know — in practice, all but nothing — but she had told Xena a great deal more. _“My mother, she ran out on us,”_ she whispered, and Mel remembered how young she looked all of a sudden, almost like a child again. It was just a moment, fleeting and clouded and refracted through Xena’s eyes, but Mel recalled it so well, the grief of a sore-hearted little girl who still couldn’t understand why her mama didn’t want her.

 _You’re a darn paradox,_ she thought, thumbing Janice’s skin. _No wonder you dress and talk and act like a man. No wonder you don’t know what it means to be a woman. You never had one stick around to show you._

“Oh…” she heard herself whisper, the word slipping out like a secret.

Janice shook her head, heat rising to her face, as though she had somehow heard all those stray thoughts, as though that lone syllable had given them all away.

“It’s not like that,” she said quietly.

Mel flushed a little, caught and not at all happy about it. “Now, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Janice looked at her for a long, wordless moment, then reached up to cover her hand again. Slowly, carefully, like she was uncovering some centuries-buried artefact, the crumbling remains of a life ended long ago, she drew Mel’s fingers away from the gauze, down past her collarbones and over the slight swell of her breast.

Mel blinked, then swallowed very hard. She’d kept her attention focused on the wound until now, the blood and the bandage far more pressing than the impropriety, but she could not ignore it now. Janice’s brassiere seemed a strange thing to her; it was incredibly tight, so much so that it must surely be uncomfortable. Given permission now, Mel stared perhaps more than she should. She had never seen one before that was built to flatten instead of flatter, had never met a woman who would sooner hide her assets than flaunt them to the world. It confused her terribly.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Janice said. She didn’t seem offended at all. “You wear your heart on your damn sleeve. And your eyes…” She chuckled. “You gotta get better at pretending to look elsewhere.”

Mel’s flush deepened. “That’s awful presumptuous, Doctor.”

“Sure it is. But it ain’t wrong.” Janice held her hand in place for a beat or two, then let her own fall away. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not like that. It’s not… it’s not so damn simple.”

“I didn’t imagine it was,” Mel said. “I don’t reckon there’s a darn thing about you that’s simple. Least of all… well, _that_.”

“Good.” Janice’s eyes slid shut. Mel knew that she ought to remove her hand, but she couldn’t seem to move. “So don’t… don’t look at me like that. Like there’s something missing, like I’m not…” Her eyes snapped open again, pupils flaring. “You can take your worry and stick it.”

Her voice broke. Mel finally came to her senses enough to take back her hand.

“It don’t matter,” she said, trying to make this easier. “You’re shot. That’s what matters.”

That brought them both back down to earth with an unpleasant bump. Janice straightened up a bit, the quiet sobriety replaced by less-than-quiet muttering, and Mel found her attention and her hands brought unwittingly back to the bandage. It was holding for now, at least, still white and clean, but Mel’s over-active imagination couldn’t help wondering how long that would last. She’d bled right through the last one, after all, in a frighteningly short while. Was this one really so much better?

“It’ll hold,” Janice said, reading her mind again. “I’ll keep the pressure on, make sure it stays tight. It’ll hold.”

Mel tried to believe her. But her mind’s eye flickered again with that awful image of Gabrielle lying in Xena’s lap with an arrow sticking out of the other shoulder, that awful scream tearing through her as Xena closed it the only way she could. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard Gabrielle scream like that, but it was the first time she’d caused it.

“If it doesn’t,” she blurted out in a tiny, frightened squeak, “are you gonna make me burn it?”

Janice frowned. “Do you think you could?” she asked, very seriously.

 _Xena could,_ Mel thought. _She did it hundreds of times, even to the woman she loved. Don’t that mean it’s in my blood too?_

“I don’t know,” she said out loud.

Janice nodded, like that was exactly what she wanted to hear. “Well,” she said, “how ’bout we make sure you never have to find out?”

She was awfully sure, shivering and sweaty and terribly pale but still as cocky as anyone Mel had ever met. Mel wished she had even just a shred of that confidence in herself, that borderline arrogance that was so maddening the rest of the time. She wished she could take the words at face value, wished she could ignore her eyes for just long enough to believe her ears. She couldn’t, though, no more than Xena could have believed Gabrielle all those times she pretended to be fine, all those times she tried to deflect the severity of a situation with a charming smile or a bad joke.

Janice didn’t have any of Gabrielle’s charm, though, and Mel didn’t have any of Xena’s control. She only had her heart, such as it was, and right now it was hammering itself straight out of her chest.

“What do we do now?” she asked, because she had to say something and that was the easiest question she could think of.

Janice took a deep breath, but she couldn’t seem to hold it. Her face went red, then she let it out in a gasping rush. Mel did not know what that meant, but she worried just the same. She wanted to touch her again, to check the bandage or let her hand slide a little further down and catch her heartbeat, let it mould itself to the curve of her breast and ask foolish, insensitive questions like _‘are they really so big that you gotta push ’em down like that?’_. She wanted to do or say whatever it took to prolong the contact, to convince herself that there was still contact to make.

She didn’t, though, because Janice had a dangerous look on her face. Even wounded and weak as she was, Mel found herself frightened; _though she be but little,_ she thought, _she is fierce._ She was glaring at the truck like it was the source of all the world’s suffering, and the last thing Mel wanted was to see that look turned back on her. She could not stand its heat.

“The only thing we can do,” Janice said at last, answering her question as if it were unimportant.

“And what’s that?” Mel asked.

Janice studied her for a long moment, then sighed. “You’re not gonna like it.”

“Well, now, I reckon there’s not much about this here situation that I do like,” Mel pointed out. She was struggling to keep her breathing steady too, and with not much more success than Janice. “But a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do.”

Janice almost smiled. “Atta girl,” she said. Then, groaning in obvious pain, she drew her gun. “Hope you’re a fast learner.”

Mel stared at the thing as Janice held it out. Her pulse thundered in her chest, cutting off her breathing and her circulation and just about every other vital function in her body.

“Oh, no.” It was barely a whisper. “No, no. I couldn’t… I couldn’t possibly…”

“You see anyone else around here with a good shooting arm?” Janice snapped. “Look. We’re stuck here. That means we’re sitting targets. When… _when_ , not _if_ … when they catch up with us, we need to be ready. We need to take them out first. Do you understand? We don’t do them, they’re gonna do us. And it’ll be ugly. It’ll be ugly and it’ll be painful, and…” Her voice hitched, and when she repeated herself her voice was was very low. “Do you understand?”

Mel did understand, of course. But understanding something was not the same as being able to do it. Mel would do almost anything to keep Janice safe and strong and alive… but could she do _that_?

“Well, now,” she stammered, “I’m not sure… that is, I don’t think I’m…”

“We take ’em out,” Janice said feverishly, “then we can take their car. Get outta here, get ourselves a nice quiet spot to lay low.”

Mel licked her lips, summoned up her courage. “Get you to a hospital?”

“No.” She softened, though, almost the instant she said it. “We lay low first. That’s more important.”

 _Not to me,_ Mel thought.

“Now, Doctor Covington.” Her voice cracked a little on _‘Doc’_ , giving away her deeper feelings. “I’m not about to sully my hands with blood to save your life just so you can turn around and throw it away on some stubborn whim.”

“I told you that’s not going to happen,” Janice said. But then she looked down, eyes midnight-dark under the lamplight, and the look on her face said more than all the words in the whole world. Mel didn’t need to know anything about gunshot wounds to know what it meant when her jaw clenched white. “ _Dammit_.”

Mel swallowed hard and followed her gaze, knowing what she would find long before her eyes confirmed it. “Janice, you—”

“I know.” Her voice seemed to come from her chest, hoarse and rasping. “Dammit, Mel, I know.”

She sat there for a very long time, breathing heavily and looking like she wanted to kill someone. Her fingers tightened into fists, tighter and whiter than her jaw, the muscles in her arm bunching as she squeezed the gun; it shook slightly in her hand, trembling on the air between them like it was a knife edge. She was losing it, Mel could tell. Her control, her confidence, everything that had ever mattered to her. She was watching it all just slip away.

Gently, aching in every part of herself, Mel leaned forward to prise the gun out of her hand. She told herself that it was just common sense, that she was just trying to keep Janice from setting it off by accident, but of course she knew wasn’t true.

The weapon settled strangely in her hands, like it knew she wasn’t its rightful owner. It was heavier than she thought it would be, the surface strange and very cold. Somehow, naively, she had expected it to feel like a child’s toy, cheap and light and useless, but it didn’t feel that way at all. It was strong and incredibly solid, unexpectedly cumbersome for something so small. Just the act of holding it was enough to make Mel lose her breath, the fear rising up and squeezing her lungs just as fiercely as Janice squeezed the gun just a moment ago.

Her hands were shaking harder than Janice’s, so she held the thing steady with both of them.

“Now, you promise me,” she said to Janice, eyes locked on the gleaming barrel. “When this is over, you promise me that you’ll let me take you someplace we can get you fixed up good and proper-like. You promise me that I won’t be shedding no man’s blood for no good reason. You promise me that, Janice. Promise me.”

Janice didn’t seem to hear. She was staring down at the bandage, numb. “Dammit,” she said. “Dammit, dammit, _dammit_.”

“Janice!”

She shook her head, as though waking from a dream, then looked up at Mel with a dazed, queasy look on her face. “I already said no,” she said. “But Christ, Mel, you’re the one with the gun and the keys and two good arms. You’re the one who can drive and shoot and God only knows what else. Me, I can barely even stand up straight. If you want to drag me there kicking and screaming, how the hell am I supposed to stop you?”

It was as close to a promise as Mel was likely to get. In truth, it was probably the closest thing to one that Janice was capable of giving.

Sick and scared and shaking, fingers sweat-slick on the grip, Mel took it.

*

Even just in theory, learning to use the darn thing was like a waking nightmare.

Mel had no idea what she was doing, and it did not help one bit that she didn’t want to know. She loathed firearms. Naturally, she’d always assumed she would never have any cause to even see one close-up, much less handle one for herself. The weight of Janice’s little revolver upset her, but not nearly so much as the way it responded to her touch. It was like a living creature, a deadly snake coiled and ready to strike, as though the slightest move would cause it to turn on her and blast her head clean from her shoulders.

“Thumb on the hammer,” Janice coached. Her voice was weaker now, Mel noticed, and had lost a little of its edge. She tried not to think about that, though, knowing all too well that there was nothing she could do. “You can use both hands if you like.”

Mel did not ‘like’. She did not like any of this. Still, she did what Janice said because this was important, because their future rested firmly in her hands and she’d be damned if she wouldn’t use them both for the task. They needed a vehicle, Janice was utterly convinced this was the only way of getting one, and for all the warrior princess’ voices in her head Mel didn’t have any better ideas.

Well, there was one. But Janice shot that down faster than their last attacker.

“Now, tell me again,” Mel had said, once and only once, “why we can’t just hitch a ride with some decent—”

“Because I’m not dragging anyone else into this,” Janice countered, a threat punctuated with her raised fist.

Of course, Mel couldn’t argue with that. She wondered how she would have felt if she were some kindly passer-by picking up a pair of strays on the road only to find she’d wandered into a bloodbath. Well, hadn’t she gone through the very same thing just a few short hours ago? There she was, as foolish and idealistic as you please, wandering cheerfully into that big old tent with no idea that she was about to be shot at, threatened, and darn near killed. Would she have thought twice about taking that trip if she’d had any idea of the dangers she was about to face?

No. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name, as surely as she knew Janice’s. It had called out to her, that name, from the moment she found that old telegram hidden away like a scandal among her daddy’s things. She couldn’t say why it spoke to her, couldn’t make any sense of the feeling that swept over her, but there it was, as true and sure as the familiarity she felt when she thought of Xena now, when she reached down inside herself and unearthed memories that weren’t her own.

When she saw Janice standing there for the first time, cocksure and arrogant and waving that darn revolver around like a toy, Mel felt like she’d come home, like she was living and breathing for the very first time in her life. Terrified though she was, traumatised and tangled up in a firestorm of gunshots and fear, still she only needed to look at that strange-yet-familiar face to know that she was was exactly where she needed to be.

She hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time. Not since that day, a year or so gone by now, when her daddy passed away and left her with a thirst for knowledge and not a darn soul left to help her quench it.

Janice left her alone while she got used to holding the gun. While Mel was willing herself to picture a flesh-and-blood enemy, a real-life person standing in front of her and waiting to get shot, Janice was rummaging noisily in the back of the truck. She was leaning on the chassis, her shoulders hunched and shuddering; her frustration at being one-handed was obvious, and Mel wanted nothing more than to drop the silly gun and rush to her side. She didn’t, though, knowing all too well what would happen if she did.

When she grew uncomfortable with the protracted silence, Mel said, “What in Heaven’s name are you doing back there?”

Janice didn’t waste the strength it would take to look up. “Finding you a target,” she grunted. “You gotta practice on something and I’d sooner it not be my head.”

Mel winced. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that yet; as a matter of fact, she was sure that she wasn’t. She didn’t mention it, though, because she knew her protestations would fall on deaf ears. Janice was a million miles past the point of taking no for an answer, or of listening to Mel’s side of things at all. Better, Mel decided, to let her failures speak for themselves when the moment came; not even Janice would be able to argue when she inevitably wasted all her ammo without once managing to hit the target.

At long last, Janice emerged from the truck. She hauled a couple of smallish, worn-looking boxes out of the back, one at a time. Mel watched her with an uneasy shudder; she didn’t want to imagine what had become of their contents, no doubt tossed aside and slung about like mismatched clothes at a junk sale. Well, needs must, of course, but disorder was such a distasteful thing, and for what? Mel could no more abide the idea of so much chaos than she could the idea of shooting little holes through little boxes.

“Don’t worry,” Janice said, reading the discomfort on Mel’s face. “Gear’s safe and sound. I’m not an animal.”

“Well, that’s good to know,” Mel got out, though no doubt her expression said something else entirely.

Limping a bit, Janice dragged the boxes a short distance away then set them down next to each other. “Aim for the left one.”

Mel hesitated. “But I’m not…”

“Do it, Mel!”

With a sigh, and knowing perfectly well that it would prove fruitless, Mel did as she was told.

_Click. Crack. Bang!_

There was no kick, no recoil, nothing. For all its weight, the gun was so small it barely even jumped in her hand. Still, though, the explosion startled her, and she fell backwards with a panicked, horror-stricken yelp.

The noise was so loud, the violence of it all so sudden; even with all the preparation in the world she would never have been ready for it. It left her cringing and cowering, the gun clattering to the ground as she dropped it, covering her head with her arms. Her upbringing left her frightened as well, albeit in a different shade; hard as it was to let go of the way she’d been raised, a part of her was waiting for the sky to open up above and the good Lord to smite her for what she’d done.

 _A box,_ she reminded herself, over and over. _It’s just a box. And you probably didn’t even get within a mile of the darn thing anyway._

When she finally found the courage to lift her head without fear of thunderbolts, she whirled on her heels and searched for Janice. In a silly, juvenile sort of way, she felt almost proud of her ineptitude, pleased to finally have inescapable proof that she could not do this, that she was not the salvation Janice seemed to believe she was.

 _I’m not Xena._ she thought. _You see that now? I can’t do the things she could do, and you’re a darn fool if you think otherwise._

“You see!” she wailed out loud, gesturing maniacally with both hands. “I told you I can’t do this, now, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?”

But Janice wasn’t listening, or even looking at her. She was leaning heavily against the truck, staring at the box with an odd look on her face.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

Mel blinked, confused. She turned back, feeling a knot of anxiety tightening in her belly, and looked for the box. Then she blinked another dozen times.

The box stood wobbling on its spot, a neat little hole shot clean through the centre.

*


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter gets pretty dark, even by my standards. If you're easily affected or upset, proceed with caution.

*

Janice made her work through a whole cylinder.

Six bullets, each one shot clean through the boxes with dead-eye accuracy, and still that tight little frown never left her face. She hated it, Mel could tell. Not just the idea that some homespun Southern gal was a half-decent shot, but the fact that she didn’t get a choice in this. It didn’t come easily to women like Janice, needing to depend on someone else, and Mel halfway suspected that she would have gladly whiled away the whole darn night wasting time like this, if only to keep herself from thinking about the harder things.

She stopped at just the one cylinder, though, if only because Mel pinned her with practicality.

“Wouldn’t you say we’re wasting precious bullets?” she asked, cutting in with a sweet little smile before Janice had a chance to push for more.

Janice scowled, then swore under her breath. She’d spat out so many curses in the last hour or two that Mel was starting to recognise her favourite ones.

“Fine,” she grunted, annoyed. “You know how to reload, at least?”

Mel certainly did not. Yet somehow, after she’d done it just once, she felt like she’d been doing it her all her life, like holding and firing and reloading lethal weapons was as natural and normal as breathing and thinking and dreaming.

It scared the life out of her, quite honestly. Mel had never been the kind of gal who enjoyed violence for its own sake; heck, she couldn’t even tolerate it in the movies. She was the diplomat, the one who would always go out of her way to find a peaceable solution to any problem no matter how thorny. Even as a little girl, an eager young slip of a thing who might have been forgiven a bit of playful rough-and-tumble, still she always did whatever she could do defuse a fight rather than encourage it.

Janice might have been raised with a revolver in one hand and a bullwhip in the other, but Mel certainly was not, and this whole situation sat wrong with her. Feeling Janice’s gun come to life in her hands, feeling her instincts — no, _Xena’s_ instincts; what a difference that was — take over, unwanted and uninvited, left a bitter taste in her mouth. She wanted it all to be over. The need for violence, the way she suddenly understood it, the memories and reflexes awakening in her head, and the awful look on Janice’s face. She didn’t want to be the one getting her hands dirty for the greater good; she’d never wanted to be that person.

 _This isn’t me,_ she thought miserably, and hoped against hope that Xena would hear and understand and leave. _I know it’s you, but it’s not me._

To Janice, here and tangible and more than just a voice in her head, she just said, “I don’t want to have to do this.”

“That makes two of us,” Janice said.

She sat down heavily on the ground, looking drained and weak, like just watching Mel had sucked all the strength right out of her. Maybe it had, at that; it couldn’t be any fun for her either, watching an unhappy amateur handle her precious firearm like that. As well as the helplessness, Mel supposed it must be another kind of torment having to watch from the sidelines as some other poor soul did the things she could not. As proud and stubborn as she was, it must be killing her.

“I’m sorry,” Mel blurted out.

She didn’t really know what for; there were too many reasons to count. _I’m sorry this happened, I’m sorry you got shot, I’m sorry you gotta depend on me of all people to get you through it. Heck, I’m even sorry that I’m better than you with your own darn gun._

Janice shook her head. Her eyes were shut again, her breathing shallow. “No. _I’m_ sorry.”

Well, that was unexpected. Mel blinked her surprise. Janice had never struck her as the kind to apologise for anything, much less getting hurt. She couldn’t hide the disbelief on her face, couldn’t silence the baffled “huh?” that tumbled off her lips.

Janice chuckled at her confusion, characteristically unoffended. “I never meant for you to get dragged into my crap,” she said, very softly. “Never wanted you to see the ugly side of living like this. If I’d known this would happen…”

“Now, hush.” Overwhelmed, Mel fought back the urge to touch her face. Just looking at it was painful enough, and it derailed the moment entirely. “My goodness, you’re pale.”

Janice chuckled, rejuvenated a little by the change of subject.

“Losing blood has that effect,” she said, speaking slow and careful, like each word was a terrible strain. “I’ll be fine. I promise.”

The bandage told a different story, though; it was very dark now. Mel touched it for just a second or two, and her fingers came away wet.

“Now, I don’t know if I believe that,” she breathed.

In the back of her mind, as unbidden now as it was before, she heard Xena’s voice whispering terrible things, stark warnings about infection and fever, about stubborn fools who didn’t treat their wounds properly. No doubt she thought she was helping, arming Mel with the only gift she had — _knowledge_ — but in practice it didn’t really work that way; all Mel could think of was how horrible it must be to die that way.

Her head was filled with gruesome visions, things that would have chilled even Janice, the faceless bodies of men and women that Xena had killed, and the not-so-faceless ones of friends she’d lost and buried and mourned. It would be too much for anyone, but for Mel it was the worst kind of torture. How could anyone think that knowing these things would help?

She found Janice’s hand, ignoring the grumbled protests, and held on tight.

Janice sucked in her breath, but once again she couldn’t seem to hold it. “You’ll come through,” she said, with quiet conviction. “The next bastard dumb enough to come after us, you’ll take him out. You will.”

“I don’t know,” Mel mumbled. She tried to think of the hole-riddled boxes instead of hole-riddled people, tried to picture this as something a little less real, like a game instead of a terrible tragedy. “Janice, I…”

“You can do it,” Janice said. “I know you can.”

Loathe though she was to admit it, Mel knew it too. Even without the boxes sitting there and making the point loud and clear, the truth of it was flooding her veins like a kind of drug. Xena’s experiences, Xena’s knowledge, a thousand terrible things that might belong in the heart of a warrior princess but surely did not belong in Mel’s.

Not that it mattered, really, whether they belonged in her or not. The plain fact was, they _were_ there and there was nothing she could do about it. That she could do this, that she was capable… well, that was never the question.

“Janice,” she said again, and for just a second it wasn’t Xena’s voice she heard in her head but Gabrielle’s. “Janice, I don’t want to have to kill a man. I don’t want that blood on my hands, or my conscience.”

“I don’t want it either.” Janice was the one who sounded like Xena now, angry and haunted and brittle only in the places no-one was allowed to see. Mel wondered how many of those terrible things she saw in her head were there in Janice’s too, not as gifts from an ancient ancestor but from her own experiences. “That’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. And _you_ …” She shook her head, deeply upset. “Jesus Christ, Mel, you’re the best of all of us.”

“We’ve barely known each other a day,” Mel pointed out, touched just the same. “How could you possibly know that?”

“How long you think someone like me needs to spend with someone like you?” Janice shot back. “I know what ain’t good. I see it in the mirror every goddamn day. You… you’re the opposite of that. Didn’t need to know you more than a damn minute to know that much. You’re good and you’re kind, and _Jesus_ , you’re so damn innocent it makes me sick to look at you. I’m as selfish as they come, Mel Pappas, but you better believe I’d throw myself into the goddamn fire if that’s what it took to keep your hands and your conscience clean.”

Mel had to swallow very hard to suppress a wave of emotion. She’d never known anyone to look at those things — goodness, kindness, innocence — as something rare or perishable. Back home they were just expected, not just of her but of everyone else too. There was nothing commendable, so far as she was concerned, in not wanting to take a man’s life, but here was Janice staring at her like basic human decency made her some kind of a saint. It brought a rush of heat to her face and left her wondering if Xena ever made Gabrielle feel so darn beautiful with just a look.

 _I don’t know,_ Xena’s voice told her. _But she certainly did it to me._

Mel swallowed again, shaking off the thought before it could make her blush too red. “Well now,” she said to Janice, grounding herself in here and now, in what was important. “If that’s not the gunshot wound talking, I don’t know what is. You sure you’re not delirious?”

Janice mustered a husky laugh. “Sweetheart, I’m always delirious.”

Given the situation, that wasn’t particularly comforting. “Now, Janice…”

“All right, all right. I’m sorry.” She leaned back, ducking easily out of reach as Mel leaned in to touch her face. “Look. You’re a great shot. Even better than me, maybe. If they give you an opening, go for the extremities. Arms, feet, shoulder…” Trailing off, she looked down at the bandage, the bloodstain soaking through, then sighed and amended, “Maybe not the shoulder.”

Mel winced, reading the truth between the lines. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“No.” She was clenching her jaw painfully tight, struggling in vain to keep her teeth from chattering again. “And even if it was, it wouldn’t matter. Okay? None of it matters because you’re going to take out the next bastard who comes at us, and you’re going to get us a car, and you’re going to drive and drive and keep driving until we hit a town. You’re going to do everything exactly like I told you, and we’re going to get the hell out of here.”

“But what if I don’t—”

“You will.”

“And what if _they_ don’t?” The question, blurted out in frustration, left her shaken and afraid; she didn’t need to see Janice blanch to know that this couldn’t be an option, that they couldn’t afford it. “What if that fella back there was the only one? What if no-one else comes after us?”

“They will.”

“But—”

“They _will_.”

She looked so tired. Her voice was a rasp, painful and jagged, a rusty blade lodged in her chest, and her eyes were fluttering. She couldn’t think, Mel realised. She couldn’t plan for any other outcome, couldn’t come up with a contingency plan, couldn’t do much of anything at all. Heaven preserve her, she was exhausted.

Mel recognised that feeling well; she’d been fighting it herself almost since those darn gunshots woke her the first time.

She wanted to rest. She wanted them both to rest. She wanted to curl up on the side of the road, hold Janice close until they both fell asleep. Sitting here like this, the two of them so darn close but not really able to touch, Janice shivering and Mel trembling, both of them waiting for some possibly-imaginary enemy to show up and start shooting at them… with all that going on at once, it was suddenly very hard for Mel not to think about how long it had been since she got any amount of sleep worth getting.

Janice would call her spoiled for that, she knew, but that didn’t help much right now. She’d never missed a full night’s sleep in her whole darn life, and she wasn’t prepared for the weight of it. Not once, not even after her daddy’s death; her circadian rhythms ran like clockwork. But here she was now, staying up all night to protect a woman she’d only just met, a woman who had shot and dodged — and, yes, taken — more bullets in the last day than Mel had ever seen before. It was the strangest, most disorienting feeling in the world. Like being drunk, but a lot less fun.

Desperate though she was, she knew that she couldn’t sleep. Not here, not now. And Janice… well, she surely couldn’t let Janice sleep. Mel didn’t know very much, but she surely knew that. As pale as Janice was right now, and with as much blood as she’d lost, if she drifted off she might not wake again. That wasn’t Xena’s knowledge; it didn’t need to be. Mel could see it for herself, right there in the glazed, too-bright depths of her eyes. Exhausted, incoherent, probably delirious, but they said real loud the part that mattered: _don’t you dare let me sleep._

Mel steadied herself, blinked the weariness out of her eyes, and looked down at the gun in her hands. It seemed so small sitting there like that, so innocent and simple, so deceptively harmless. She loathed the darn thing.

“Aim for the extremities,” she murmured, a hopeful reminder to herself.

Janice nodded, then touched her face. The contact came out of nowhere, unexpected but definitely not unwelcome; Mel couldn’t remember Janice ever touching her without the cover of some emergency or another. Was it not just a moment ago that she ducked out of reach before Mel could do the same? Janice had no trouble shoving her around or grabbing her by the arm or generally treating her like a sack of potatoes, but she’d never shown this sort of tenderness before. Looking into her eyes, Mel found them glassy and unfocused.

“We’ll keep that innocence of yours intact,” Janice was mumbling, the words all but lost as she leaned in to press her cheek against Mel’s. “I promise.”

Mel nodded, swallowing down a lump in her throat. “I sure do hope so.”

But deep down inside herself, in the places even Xena couldn’t reach, she thought, _for how long?_

*

They hunkered down in the cab of the truck, ducked down and out of sight, and waited.

Mel was scared out of her wits. Every nerve in her body felt like it was on fire, every vein lit up and burning in spite of her exhaustion; she wanted to sleep, but at the same time she wanted to scream. She felt like she was quaking, but next to Janice’s her own body felt almost impossibly still. Janice, utterly calm, was shivering so violently that the tremors rocked the truck. Lifeless, lightless, still the darn thing creaked and moaned as though it felt as frightened as Mel.

An hour passed, and with it only three sets of headlamps. The first flashed by in a speeding frenzy, gone before Mel even realised what it was; she must have been dozing or distracted because her foggy brain didn’t even register that it was a vehicle until long after it was gone. She blinked and frowned, shaking off the afterimage of dazzling light, and it was only when she turned to look at Janice and found her breathless and spitting curses that she understood there might have been a danger there.

She wasn’t used to being so alert all the time. To Janice, it seemed that every sound, every flicker, every shift in the air was a potential threat; Mel didn’t know how to look at the world that way, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“You have to focus,” Janice told her, peevish and in pain. “You let ’em sneak up on us, we’re dead.”

Mel nodded, feeling the cold steel of the revolver pressing against her palm. She lifted the darn thing as high as she could without giving herself away, held it steady, and did as she was told.

The second car zoomed past just as fast as the first, but this time Mel was so attuned that she could have counted the hairs in the driver’s moustache. He was harmless too, of course, there and then gone in the blink of an eye, but Mel had the hitch in Janice’s breathing to remind her of what might happen if he wasn’t, and this time her focus was absolute.

When the car — and the non-existent threat — was gone, Janice leaned in to catch Mel’s free hand. She squeezed it gently, as silent as the grave, and her lips lifted just slightly. _Good girl,_ she didn’t say, and Mel felt her belly flood with warmth.

The third car trundled up real slow and quiet, high beams cutting like shrapnel through the dark.

 _This is it,_ Mel’s nerves shrieked, a burst of instinct and intuition that she didn’t fully understand.

Beside her, no doubt sensing the same thing, Janice sucked in her breath. For a second or two, Mel was sure she could hear the thundering of both their pulses. She did not waste the half-second it would have taken to turn to Janice say _‘it’s all right’_ ; instead, she blocked her out completely. She silenced the sound of her heartbeat, of both their heartbeats, shielded her eyes from the dazzling headlamps, shut down the homespun horror rising up in her throat; just like Janice told her, just as Xena showed her, she _focused_.

She could not say how she knew when the moment was right. It was intuitive, the kind of deep-down impossible-to-define feeling that came with breathing, walking, thinking. It was like the way her mama always described childbirth; _“your body just knows,”_ she said, and young Mel always prayed she would never understand. She did not stop to wonder at the feeling, or to think. She just acted.

Raising the gun high, she thumbed the hammer just like Janice showed her, then rolled head-first out of the truck.

“Mel, don’t—”

But Mel wasn’t listening any more. She couldn’t afford to listen, not to Janice or anything else; if she listened, she would lose that ever-crucial focus, and with it her advantage. She’d never done anything like this in her whole darn life, but she knew the rules as surely as if she’d been here a thousand times before. It was the most peculiar thing; she was still herself, still utterly aware of what was happening and what she was doing, but Xena’s experiences, her memories, her life, sang through her veins like a second heartbeat.

There were two of them in the car, a driver and a passenger, both snarling and out for blood. The driver had both his hands on the wheel, but the passenger had a pistol in his; he only managed to raise the thing halfway before Mel shot a hole clean through the open window.

The gun flew out of his hand, struck with pinpoint precision and not a moment’s thought, and the poor fella couldn’t do anything but gawk, mouth dropping comically open like he’d never seen anything like it in his life. No doubt he’d expected Janice instead, and even Mel was familiar with the Covington reputation by now. No doubt he was as shocked that she’d left his extremities intact as he was that she’d made the shot.

Whether it would stay that way was still on the table. Oh, she wanted it to — even now she grew faint and dizzy at the thought of shedding someone else’s blood — but she had Janice’s voice hissing and spitting in her ears and Xena’s ringing in the back of her head, both of them warning her of the dangers in leaving the job only half-done.

 _You don’t know what he’ll do next,_ Xena was telling her, and in her heart Mel knew that it was true. _Fear makes us all desperate, and desperation is dangerous. All he needs is a moment, another weapon hidden out of sight. You know he’ll kill her if you don’t kill him first. You know he will._

Mel didn’t want to believe that. It went against everything she was, everything she believed in her heart. She had been raised good and kind, raised to believe in the basic decency of all people, and she did not want to believe that anyone was capable of those things. Desperate or not, weren’t people supposed to be fundamentally good? Wasn’t that what they taught in church?

She struggled for a moment, the gun twitching indecisively in her hand, searching with her own kind of desperation for some kind of middle ground, some softer way out of this situation, some—

_Click._

“No!”

She didn’t wait. She couldn’t. She didn’t stop to check, didn’t take the time to be sure, didn’t hold out for the _crack_ and the _bang_ that she knew would follow given half a second. There was no time for any of that; if it was coming, it would be on her before she had a chance. She couldn’t afford to question or doubt, couldn’t afford to think or feel at all. And so she didn’t.

She pulled back the hammer, splitting the air with another _click_ , took maybe half a second to aim, then unloaded the revolver straight into the car.

Just like before, her accuracy was devastating. Two bullets through the passenger, two through the driver, and the last one tore a chunk out of the seat, the rip in the upholstery like a flag planted in the ground to say _this is mine_.

Silence followed, more deafening than a thousand gunshots, punctuated only by her own heavy breathing. She hit the ground, only dimly aware of the impact jolting her bones, the gravel digging into her knees; it was all so far away that it might as well have been happening to someone else entirely. The ground was hard beneath her but she felt like she was floating high above the world. The silence, the smoke, the gun in her hand… it was all she could see, hear, feel. Everything else just disappeared.

 _Well done,_ she heard inside her head, but for once it didn’t sound like Xena.

A moment and a lifetime later, Janice staggered out of the truck and limped over to her side.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

 _Aim for the extremities,_ Mel thought queasily. It was the only thing she could process, the only thing that seemed to matter. _Isn’t that what she told you to do? Aim for the extremities. You could have done it good and clean. You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to…_

“What have I done?” she heard herself choke. “Lord have mercy, what have I…”

“You did what you had to,” Janice told her. Mel looked up, tried to catch her eye or else to read her expression, but her vision too was blurry and the world was a tilting, swirling mess of tears and pain. She couldn’t see anything at all, and when Janice spoke again it brought no comfort at all. “You did good, Mel. You did good.”

Mel shook her head, feeling utterly hollow. “I don’t think I did,” she said. “My goodness, I…”

“Yeah. I know.” Distantly, she was aware of Janice’s fingers, freezing cold, pressing lightly against the skin of her wrist. “Stay here, okay? I’m gonna go take a look.”

“No.” Her voice was not her own. It was shaking, weak, and carried no trace of her usual accent. “You’re hurt. If they’re not…”

But the word would not come.

“Mel…”

Janice’s voice didn’t sound like her own either; Mel’s name was like a dry heave. She wanted to say it for her, Mel could tell, to make this easier. But she could not allow that to happen.

As easy as it would be to let Janice say the word on her behalf, the word she’d probably said a thousand times herself, it wasn’t her place. The bodies — _merciful Heavens, they’re bodies!_ — weren’t Janice’s, they were Mel’s. If anyone was going to say the word, if anyone owed them the courtesy of confession, it had to be her.

“No,” she managed. “If they’re not… _dead_ …” She swallowed hard, then willed herself to go on. “You won’t stand a chance. I should be the one to… to check.” _I should be the one to look my victims in the eye._ “You know it.”

Janice shook her head. She did know it, of course; she just didn’t care. “Stay here,” she said again. Her eyes were as empty as Mel felt. “Please.”

Mel hated that word. It made them both helpless.

She nodded, though she knew it was foolish, though she knew it was flat-out dangerous. Her spirit might have been willing to do what was right, but the flesh was not; she couldn’t have moved even if she wanted to. Her whole body felt like it had been drained of all its blood and water, like there was nothing left inside her at all, not even the strength to protest.

More than that, though, even though she knew that it was her responsibility — _you owe it to them, and to yourself, to look them in their lifeless eyes_ — she couldn’t bear even the idea of seeing first-hand the damage she’d done.

Her whole life, Mel had never raised so much as a finger against another living soul. As a child she would weep bitterly when her playmates would step on ants or when her mama would wail for Daddy to kill a spider or a beetle. She couldn’t bear the thought of such cruelty, such unnecessary violence, when the beetles and the spiders and all the other little things just wanted to be left in peace. _“It’s not their fault!”_ she cried to her mother once, a precocious little thing at five years old. _“They live here too!”_

To think, she mused queasily, that such an innocent little thing could grow up into this. A murderer and a monster, and for what?

It didn’t matter that her heart was still the same, that she was weeping inside now just as she did all those years ago; it didn’t matter that she hated what had happened, what she’d been forced to do. She knew that it was necessary, that she’d had no other choice, but still she hated herself. That didn’t matter either, she reminded herself, angry because she thought it would cushion the blow; what good was penance when their hearts had stopped and their souls were departed? None of it mattered at all.

She knew now, inescapably and beyond all shadow of doubt, that she really was capable of this. Shedding blood, inflicting pain, taking a life… she had done all those terrible things, and without so much as a thought. There was no doubt about it now: Xena lived within her, not just in memory but in deed as well. Mel could never go back to what she was before.

 _Lord have mercy,_ she thought, over and over and over. _Lord have mercy on my soul._

It felt like less than a heartbeat before Janice was back at her side. Mel hadn’t even noticed when left; she only remembered her insisting that she would. She must have done it, though, because all of a sudden she was back, dropping down onto the gravel beside her with a sad, somber look on her face.

She looked ill. Her face was white as a gravestone, her chest heaving; she was breathless and shaking and soaked, like that little trip had taken her all the way around the world a dozen times over.

She stared at Mel, pupils dancing feverishly in her eyes, but all she could say was, “You did good.”

Mel noted the tremor in her voice, the sickly pallor to her skin, the nervous twitch in her hands. She noted too, though she wished she didn’t, the way Janice did not explicitly say _‘they’re dead’_.

“Did I?” she asked, almost pleading.

“Yeah.” Janice swallowed a few times. She looked like she desperately wanted to be sick but didn’t have the strength. “Yeah, you did. Clean and quick, like a damn pro. They wouldn’t have…”

She trailed off, swallowing again.

 _They wouldn’t have suffered,_ Xena’s voice supplied, low with cruel compassion. _She’s saying it would’ve been painless._

Mel wondered if that was supposed to make her feel better somehow, if by some miracle it became less of a sin to take a man’s life if a voice in her head told her it didn’t hurt. She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel; she didn’t know if she was really capable of feeling anything.

Her heart felt sick, her soul numb and broken, but when she looked inside herself she could not make sense of anything. She wasn’t sure it was possible to come back from this, or if she should even want to. She had been changed; there was no escaping that. Wouldn’t it be a more terrible sin to turn her back on it, walk away and pretend that nothing had happened at all?

“Why didn’t I listen to you?” she asked out loud, gazing up at Janice like she hung the moon. “Go for the extremities. You told me to do that. Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I do that?”

She was pleading, begging for an answer, an explanation, praying that Janice would wash her clean by telling her that she said no such thing, that it was just a lie to make her feel better, even that the men were armless and legless, that there were no extremities to go for. Absurd, of course. Ridiculous. But _oh_ , what she would give to hear it.

Janice didn’t say any of those things, though. She just shook her head, sighed deeply, and said, “Instinct.” 

“That’s no answer,” Mel whispered.

“Maybe not,” Janice said, soft and low, compassionate for probably the first time in her life. “But that’s what it was. Reflex. Instinct.”

Mel shook her head. _Maybe so,_ she thought. _But they weren’t mine._

That was the hard truth, the ruthless, awful thing. If the instinct had been hers, she might be able to live with that, guilty and horrified but aware of her part in it. If she’d had the skill to shoot those men dead all on her lonesome, maybe she could find some peace in knowing that she’d used them for the right reasons, to help someone, even to keep someone alive. Maybe. But they weren’t her instincts that had pulled that darn trigger, they weren’t her reflexes that had told her she couldn’t afford to wait, and they sure as heck weren’t her skills that made her hit her darn mark.

That was Xena. All of it. Xena’s instincts, Xena’s reflexes, Xena’s skills. Xena, Xena, _Xena_.

So why was Mel the one with blood on her hands?

*

Janice dragged the bodies out of the car.

She did it all on her own, one-handed and clumsy, grunting and groaning and barely able to hold herself upright, but she did not complain. It was a remarkable feat of strength, or else it would have been if the situation had been a little different.

As it was, it felt like a tragedy. This wasn’t Janice’s job; it wasn’t her mess to clean up. Mel watched, feeling lost and dissociated, and wished that she had the courage or the stomach to do the deed herself. Janice might be a stubborn bull-headed mule who would never admit it, but she was desperately weak; she didn’t have the strength for any of this, and even if she had she shouldn’t be the one having to do it. It wasn’t fair that Mel’s newly-awakened talents only applied to inflicting pain and not easing it.

 _That part will come too,_ Xena promised, but Mel didn’t want to hear anything she had to say.

When she was done liberating the car of its corpses, Janice collapsed on the side of the road. She lay there, face down in the gravel, shoulders heaving as she breathed, and did not move for a long time. Mel studied the curve of her back; she wanted to go to her, wanted to apologise, but she was still completely paralysed.

She remembered their last altercation, the one that started all this. _“He shot first,”_ Janice said, forcing out the words through gritted teeth, and Mel had taken some small comfort from that. If the darn fool had just kept his weapon holstered…

Where was that excuse now, she wondered bitterly. Who could she blame for the holes in those two men? She hadn’t given either one of them a chance to shoot; she’d heard the _click_ , and then it was all over. She had acted on borrowed instinct, given in to someone else’s reflexes, and now she would never know if it was really, truly necessary. Would those lifeless bodies really have killed them both? Janice certainly seemed to think so, and Mel knew that Xena felt the same way, but did that make them right?

At least Janice had a hole in her shoulder, proof positive that her little slaughterfest was the right call. What did Mel have, other than Janice’s voice in her ear telling her that she did ‘good’ and Xena’s in her head insisting that she did the ‘right thing’? How could she trust two people with so many deaths on their consciences and so much blood on their hands? It surely didn’t fit with any definition she’d ever heard of ‘right’ or ‘good’.

“Mel?”

Janice still hadn’t moved. Mel wanted to go to her, but she wasn’t sure she could move either. She didn’t have the excuse of a gunshot wound, though, or of having dragged two dead bodies out of a car with only one good arm. She only had her own weaknesses, cowardice and foolishness and that damnable curse of compassion.

With a great force of will, she raised her head. She was shivering all over, every muscle in her body aching like she was recovering from some fitful illness.

“Janice.”

Responding to her name, Janice made a low noise, like a moan. “You all right?”

“Well, now,” Mel managed weakly, “shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

They both knew the answer to that, though, and Janice did not dignify the bravado with a response.

“Look,” she said, slow and careful and still not moving. “If you can stand, I need you over here.”

Mel felt the acid in her stomach turn to ice. “What’s wrong?”

Seeming to sense that playing it coy wouldn’t get her anywhere this time, Janice sighed. “Bandage,” she said, and the word seemed to take everything she had.

The chill in Mel’s stomach spread out and up, rising into her chest, her arms, her extremities. She took a deep breath, and forced herself up to her feet.

“I’m coming,” she said to them both.

She had to pass by the bodies to get to Janice. The sight of them lying there on the roadside, their empty faces death-white and bloodless, almost made her retch. She couldn’t see the holes, and was too afraid to look for them. How strange, she thought dizzily, to kill a man and not really know how or where. There was blood pooling underneath them, spreading slowly and seeping into the dirt. There was so much of the stuff, almost more frightening in its own way than the blood she would find soaking Janice’s bandage; it all looked the same, blood and blood and still more blood, but to Mel it felt very different.

“Melinda.” Janice’s voice was a croak, her eyes barely half-open. She hauled herself up into a sitting position, groaning in exhaustion, and Mel stared at the bandage. “Mel, it’s okay. We’re okay. Everything—”

“No, it’s not,” Mel said, sharper than she intended. “It’s not okay at all.”

Janice swallowed hard, then shut her mouth.

She sucked in her breath when Mel peeled away the soiled gauze. The skin close to the wound was hot and sticky, but when Mel let her fingers fall away to find her face instead she found it clammy and as cold as ice. _You told me it wasn’t bad,_ she thought, desperate and spiralling into a nightmare. _What the heck is this if not bad?_

Janice groaned at the contact, but didn’t push her away. “Should’ve sent you home when I had the chance.” she mumbled.

 _You tried,_ Mel remembered wretchedly. _Heaven knows, you tried._

Squeezing her eyes shut, she thought back to that fateful moment. It was a lifetime gone by now, a dozen lifetimes; she recalled the look on Janice’s face as she stormed out of her tent, the anger at having been caught with her metaphorical pants down, and perhaps at having been forced to protect some silly uninvited guest. Mel was not ashamed to admit, with the benefit of hindsight, that her presence was more of a hindrance than a help when it came to facing Smythe and his goons.

Janice certainly hadn’t shied away from pointing that out. _“You don’t belong here,”_ she said. Goodness, how right she was.

It was a warning, Mel realised now, not the insult she’d thought it was at the time. She was so dogged then, so darn sure that she could handle anything that came at her, and she’d laughed it off without a thought. She’d just been shot at, taken captive and held at gunpoint, and lived to tell the tale without so much as a scratch! Giddy, euphoric, and driven by adrenaline, she really believed she was invincible. She felt like she was alive, really and truly, for perhaps the first time, like nothing could touch her and no-one else would be foolish enough to try. This was where she needed to be; she might not have known anything else but she surely knew that.

 _What a fool I was,_ she thought now, sad and broken.

Her hand fell away from Janice’s face, folded in her lap. Janice took it in her own, squeezing gently. Her fingers felt so fragile all of a sudden, white and cold and shaking; Mel looked down into her face, and for a moment she seemed impossibly young.

“How long you been living like this?” she heard herself ask. She’d wondered it many times before, but now that she’d gone and asked the question she realised that she didn’t want to know. “How many times does a gal gotta get nearly killed before she thinks it’s okay? How many lives she gotta take before she thinks it’s normal?”

“I don’t know,” Janice said with a heavy, honest sigh. “It’s different for everyone, I think.”

Mel unrolled a fresh bandage. She didn’t know why they were bothering, to be frank. She didn’t know why Janice kept insisting on this silly pretence, on making believe it would make the least bit of difference. It hadn’t before; did she really think Mel was so darn simple she’d believe it would make one now?

Probably not. More likely, she was using it as a cover, distracting Mel from the more pressing issue, the darker blood pooling all around them, the stuff that came not from Janice but from elsewhere. She could feel it all over her hands, invisible to the naked eye; she hadn’t touched the bodies, hadn’t gotten the stuff on her skin, but that didn’t matter. What difference did it make that it wasn't really there; she knew that it was.

No doubt Janice thought she could make her forget about their blood if she painted over it with her own, a pint for the living the balance out the dead. It wouldn’t work, of course; Mel wouldn’t let it. She knew what she’d done, and she couldn’t let Janice or anyone else try to make her feel better about it.

“How was it for you?” she asked, very softly. Another question she didn’t want answered.

This time, though, Janice just blinked. “Hm?”

“The first time you…” She trailed off with a shudder. It was a terror to picture it, much less say the word. Still, going by the way Janice turned even paler, she understood well enough. _The first time you did this._ “How old were you?”

“Fourteen.” She said it without emotion, without anything.

It was not a surprise. Mel wished that it was. “Still just a child.”

Janice made a trembling, broken fist. “He didn’t think so.”

_Oh, Lord._

Mel didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know if she could speak at all. The world was wobbling on its axis, split clean down the centre, and she didn’t think it would ever right itself again. The war raging through the continent, threatening to spill over and swallow the whole world… that was supposed to be the very worst of humanity, the most terrible things anyone could see or be or know. It was the depths and the dregs, the very darkest reaches of despair. It was bleak enough that Ares, the god of war, had wanted in on it. Wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t the rest of the world supposed to be safer, lighter, kinder?

Apparently not. Half a day in the company of Janice Covington had unearthed worse things than Mel could ever have imagined, scars and blood and death, and it didn’t have a darn thing to do with the war or anything else. This was just life, just the way it was for people like Janice. Blood, and not just the free-flowing kind, people hurting and killing and hating each other over a few scraps of parchment, and why? What was so darn important about those scrolls that they could turn anyone who touched them into a monster and a maniac and a murderer?

Of course, she knew the answer to that one. It was right there inside her, that tortured whisper in the back of her head. Hundreds, even thousands of years after her death, and Xena was still inflicting pain everywhere she went.

 _It ends here,_ Mel decided. _Lord have mercy on both of us. Your violence ends with me._

She looked down at the wound on Janice’s shoulder. “It don’t look good.”

“I know.” She sounded numb. Mel wondered whether it was the pain or the memory making her sound that way, if it was now or then that made her lip tremble. “Bind it tight. Like you did before.”

“It didn’t do no good before, Janice.” But she did what she was told just the same, putting her faith in lies like Janice was, because the alternative was thinking and feeling and knowing the truth. “How far to the next town?”

“Dunno.”

Mel sighed, but didn’t press the issue. Not even Janice, who prided herself on knowing everything about everything, could possibly know every road in Macedonia. They’d been travelling for hours, in the dead of night and with bloodthirsty thugs on their tails; no doubt she didn’t even really know where they were any more, much less how to get to some other place. She wouldn’t admit it, though, no matter how hard Mel pushed her; in any case, Mel had no intention of trying.

Janice was exhausted, barely holding it together, and though Mel wasn’t faring much better inside her head at least she still had the use of her limbs. It was more than Janice had, and darn it all wasn’t that enough? Mel could be the strong one for once. She _could_.

“We’ll get there,” she promised, holding her voice steady. “I’ll get us there.”

“Course you will,” Janice said. Her eyes drifted shut. “Christ, I’m tired.”

Mel blinked back tears. “Me too, Janice.”

Janice didn’t open her eyes, but she unclenched her fist, and her sticky, frozen fingers found Mel’s again as though by a different kind of instinct.

“Ain’t gonna get any less messy,” she mumbled. “You really sure you want to stick around?”

Mel glanced back at the two fresh corpses, looked at them for as long as she could stand it. The sun was just starting to rise on the horizon, bathing the road and the figures in pale orange light. It would be morning soon, bright enough to make out their faces instead of just their shapeless bodies, the faceless silhouettes even darker than the gravel road. She didn’t know if she had the stomach to see them, to look into the eyes of the men she’d killed. Janice’s man, the one she slaughtered earlier, had his eyes wide open after he died; Mel wondered if those two had died the same way.

She knew what Janice was really trying to say. Gasping, shivering, halfway to delirious, still somehow she managed to be more coherent and make more sense than Mel.

_You stick around and it’s going to get worse. I can’t promise those won’t be the only lives you take. I can’t promise I won’t get shot again. Hell, I can’t promise you won’t get shot someday too. You stick around and you’re going to hurt people. You’re going to hurt yourself and I’m going to hurt you too, and all I have to offer is a beat-up old truck and a handful of scrolls telling stories you’ve already got in your head. Is it really worth all that, Mel Pappas?_

“Yes,” she heard herself whisper, answering all those questions at once.

Janice moaned a little. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Mel said, and tried to smile. “Someone’s gotta keep you out of trouble, now, don’t they?”

Slowly, effortfully, Janice cracked one eye open.

“Christ, you’re an idiot,” she said, and laughed.

*

They left most of their gear in the truck.

Not the scrolls, of course. That went without saying; Janice would sooner go without the clothes on her back than those silly pieces of parchment. She clutched the satchel to her chest, using both hands and barely even acknowledging the pain in her shoulder. Mel knew better by now than to ask whether those old stories were really worth so darn much; she’d seen what Smythe and his men were willing to do for a chance at them, and there was no doubt in her mind that Janice was willing to do far worse.

“If it comes down to it,” Janice said, hugging the darn thing like a child’s favourite toy. “You pick them over me. You understand? You take them, then you translate them, and…”

“Now, what good would that do without you?” Mel countered, searching among her own things for what Janice might accept as ‘necessary’. “Your daddy’s reputation don’t mean a darn thing to me.”

“Call it a last wish,” Janice said with a pained shrug. “You wouldn’t deny me that, would you?”

“Well, if the alternative was keeping you alive, surely—”

“Ugh, you’re useless.”

Her voice cracked just a little as she said it, though, like she didn’t have the strength or the inclination to argue any more; the latter was frankly more worrying than the former. She let her head drop down onto the satchel, using it like a sort of pillow while she waited for Mel to sort through her things, and grumbled miserably to herself.

“Should never have let that low-life son of a bitch Kleinman make off with as many as he did.”

Mel chuckled, thinking of the dapper young fella with honest fondness. “Well, now, I’m still surprised you let him take any at all.”

“Only the worthless ones,” Janice said, though the flush on her neck told a very different story. “There’s not an institution this side of the Atlantic who’d waste their time reading scrolls about Joxer. If that’s what it takes to keep the bastard’s mouth shut…”

Mel chuckled. “Now, that’s as may be,” she said. “But you didn’t _have_ to part with them.”

“You calling me a soft touch?”

“Calling you a decent person, maybe.”

“Same goddamn thing.”

Mel shook her head, but she knew better than to press that particular issue. The silence that followed draped itself over her shoulders like a moth-eaten old blanket; once upon a time the quiet might have given her a measure of comfort, but now it just reminded her of what she’d gone through to get here. She had to close her eyes to block it out, all the blood that had followed her seemingly from the moment she touched down in Macedonia. How many people had died now for those darn scrolls? And here was Janice, sulking because she’d parted ways with less than a handful. _Should’ve let him make off with them all,_ Mel thought spitefully.

“I don’t think Xena would approve of all this bloodshed in her name,” she said aloud. The ache that swelled in her chest told her it was true. “She worked real hard to become something better than that.”

Janice shook her head, though the motion seemed to make her ill. Maybe she didn’t believe it, or maybe she just didn’t want to. There was a doggedness in her, a sort of desperation that transcended even the pain and the exhaustion.

“She’d understand the importance of preserving her legacy,” she said.

“No,” Mel insisted. “No, I don’t reckon she’d want that at all. If all she’s gonna be remembered for is bloodshed and violence and pain… my goodness, Janice, that’s the last thing in the world she would want.”

Janice huffed an impatient, irritable sigh. “Mel, she was a warrior princess. Hell, she was _the_ warrior princess. What the hell do you think those words mean?”

Frankly, Mel thought they meant a lot of things, and none of them nearly so simple as Janice wanted to believe. She also thought that someone like Janice should understand the nuances rather better than she herself did — wasn’t she supposed to be the darn historian among them? — but she kept those particular thoughts to herself.

It was far safer, she decided, to let Janice think she’d won a victory than let her wear them both out with her stubbornness and her need to be right. Janice barely had strength enough to hold her head up just now, and Mel… well, she’d never had much of a stomach for arguing.

So, to distract them both, she focused on her own things instead, trying to root out the stuff she could bear to part with.

There wasn’t much she could bring herself to leave behind. Being a sentimental sort of a gal, Mel made a habit of never getting rid of anything unless she really had no choice. She’d never seen her things as expendable before, and she’d certainly never been in a position where her fond nostalgia might be another person’s downfall. The need to make a decision bore down on her like a solid weight, fraught and frightening, and Janice’s scowly impatience didn’t help one bit; it was understandable, of course, but Mel was not the sort of person who responded well to pressure.

She couldn’t afford to take it all. she didn’t need Janice’s muttered threats to remind her of that. They had more important things to worry about, more thugs potentially on the way and a still-bleeding shoulder wound that wasn’t getting any better. Mel knew all of that, but stopping to remember it even for a second filled her with a sense of nausea so profound that she needed to turn away and breathe through her nose until it passed.

This, of course, only made Janice complain louder. Mel understood her frustration, but not without a touch of her own in turn. Sometimes it felt like they were alien to each other, each speaking a language the other could never comprehend. Janice had been living like this — hand to mouth and heels to the dirt — all her life; small wonder she couldn’t fathom why silly sentimentality and material possessions meant so darn much to Mel.

 _They keep me sane,_ she thought, and fought another wash of tears.

Janice could never understand such a thing. Lord forgive her, this emptiness was her definition of normal. How could she possibly comprehend the idea that mindlessness could help keep someone’s mind in one piece?

Mel looked down at her things, her precious, worthless things. It was all a terrible mess, the clothes and appurtenances strewn about like they’d been hit by a tornado; a fitting metaphor, she thought sadly, for the rest of her.

“You think we’ll come back?” she asked, as though it would make any of this easier.

“If they don’t get to it first.” The answer was sincere, Mel could tell, not a feint at hollow placations. “Think what you like about me, but I don’t leave stuff behind if I can help it.”

Mel nodded. She should have assumed as much, honestly; Janice was too frugal, too conscious of the cost of everything to risk having to replace her clothes and tools and equipment. It was as much in her own interest as it was in Mel’s that they come back and salvage what they could. Still, though she knew it was practicality and not compassion that made her say it, Mel found it comforting. She took a deep steadying breath, then grabbed as many necessities as she could sling onto the back seat of their stolen car.

“I’ve never been so ill-prepared in my life,” she sighed.

She only said it to fill the silence, really, but the words resonated with something inside of her. She was horrified, of course, her deep-grown Southern roots all but weeping, but she couldn’t deny the tiny little part of her that also felt a little invigorated. It was a comfort to focus on this, the simple and the material, rather than the blood and corpses just a few feet away. So long as she could still care about things that meant little or nothing, she would not lose herself.

Janice snorted. If she sensed any of that, she didn’t say so. “Congratulations,” she said, with her usual dryness.

She didn’t protest when Mel helped her into the shotgun seat. Her body was strangely limp, almost pliable, and though she didn’t let up her death-grip on the scrolls still there was an uncharacteristic obedience in her that Mel found deeply troubling. She was still pale and clammy, her forehead unpleasant to the touch, cold from the night air but sticky now as though hot; Mel was just about to ask if she should worry when she noticed, as though for the first time, that both the seats were wet with blood.

“…oh my goodness…”

It wrenched out of her like a gasp, the panic rising before she could stop it. _Oh goodness, oh Lord, oh my stars, no, no, no…_

Janice’s eyes narrowed at the sight of her, but Mel was sure she heard her pulse speed up as well.

“Christ,” she was muttering. “Not now.” 

But Mel was too far gone to respond. “Is that…” She shook her head, trying to clear it, and felt herself grow weak and dizzy. Everything stopped, everything disappeared, everything except the truth. “Sweet merciful Heavens… did I really do all that?”

“Mel, please.” Janice’s voice was high now too. “Please.”

 _I can’t,_ Mel thought, utterly helpless. _Lord have mercy, I can’t sit on that. I can’t sit in that man’s blood knowing that I’m the one who drained it out of him. I can’t sit there and drive with his blood on my skirt._

“There’s so much…” she heard herself whimper. “So much blood…”

None too gently, Janice grabbed her hand, drew her back to the bandaged wound as though hoping the more pressing urgency would shake her out of her stupor.

“There’s blood everywhere,” she said, with meaning. “Mel, _please_.”

Mel stared down at her fingers. They were stained dark, glinting in the slow-rising dawn. Janice was right, she knew; she’d become all but inured to the dark stuff staining the gauze. But it was a different thing entirely, being stained with the blood she’d tried to stem and the blood she had shed herself. Getting Janice’s blood on her hands meant that she was holding it inside; it meant that she was trying to _heal_. The blood on the seat was blood she’d shed, the mark of a murder she’d committed. It might as well be a whole other universe for all the similarities those two stains held.

Janice’s eyes were fever-bright when she caught Mel’s, glittering as dark as the blood. She looked sick, she looked hurt, she looked awful; Mel willed herself to remember that this was why she’d done it, that she’d ended those two lives so that Janice’s might be saved. She knew it in her heart, in her soul, in all the painful places she could hear Xena quietly congratulating her, but how could she convince herself it was enough when _their_ blood was all over the car? Every breath she took, ever breath Janice took was a reminder that _they_ would never draw another. How could she live with herself? How could she—

“Mel!”

“I can’t,” she whispered. “Lord forgive me, I…”

“Melinda.” The name cracked like a whip. “Mel, listen to me.”

Mel shook her head. “Janice, I _can’t_.”

“If you don’t,” Janice said quietly, “I’m going to die.”

That woke her up a little. Not much, but enough, and the panic in her chest took on a very different rhythm. Janice had never said that before; until now, she’d worked herself to the bone trying to deny it. Mel looked into her eyes, found them wet and wide, honest now for the very first time.

“You said it weren’t so bad,” she whispered, knowing now as she’d known all along that it was a lie. “You said…”

Janice laughed without humour. “I say a lot of stuff that’s bullshit.”

Mel wanted to cry. She wanted to scream, to faint, to be sick, to throw herself to the ground; she wanted to do all those things at once, and she wanted the ground to open up beneath her feet and swallow her whole before she could do any of them. She wanted the world to end, wanted all the cruelty and savagery to dissolve into nothing, wanted to wipe clean her memory so she would never again be forced to live through it.

She wanted Janice to not be in pain, and she wanted her to know how it felt to never have inflicted any, to have her hands and her body clean of blood and scars. She didn’t know which she wanted more, Janice’s health or her purity, and the confusion frightened her. Would she really let this woman die if it meant she’d go out with a clean conscience, or was it just that she knew her life would not have been so bleak if she never killed?

Janice’s life had never been truly her own. Mel knew that. Her daddy’s quest and her mother’s absence had made her what she was, had turned her into this scarred, scratched-up, violent bit of a thing; they had wrecked her before she ever had a chance to get strong, and though they were the ones who’d shaped her she was the one who had to live with it. Mel would give anything to strip all of that away, to see if only briefly what Janice was like when she was young and untouched, those few precious moments before innocence was strangled by obsession.

She would give anything to strip herself of the pain as well. Janice had spent her whole darn life searching for Xena, but Mel would surrender hers without hesitation if it meant she would never have to hear her name.

She couldn’t do that, though. She couldn’t undo Janice’s experiences and she couldn’t change her own. She could only live with the world and their lives as they were, the pain they’d both endured and inflicted, and their separate, connected reasons. She could only do what she had to do, could only look down at the blood-drenched seat and accept that she would have to sit there, that she would have to soak up all that blood and carry it within herself, that she could not escape it by turning away. It was inside of her, and there it would remain whether she wanted to admit it or not; the stain on her soul wouldn’t erase itself just because she kept it off her clothing.

She took a breath, drove down all those terrible, tragic thoughts.

“You’re not gonna die,” she said to Janice. “I promise.”

Eyes closed, breathing unbearably shallow, Janice didn’t answer.

*


	4. Chapter 4

*

Mel drove like a woman possessed.

The car was quieter and considerably more stable than the battered old truck that had brought them this far. It had doors, for a start, and when she floored the pedal it didn’t scream like it was about to fall apart. Were it not for the blood and the stench of death it would have been a grand improvement; as it was, even the relative smoothness made Mel feel like she was being thrown around like a feather in a storm. Astonishing, she thought, how much power the mind could hold over the body.

She had no idea if she was going in the right direction, had no idea if there even was a right direction to be going in. She only knew that following the road was the only chance they had. There had to be something at the end of it, surely. No road could go on forever. _Surely_ …

Janice was looking much worse now. She was sitting in the shotgun seat, slumped sideways with her head lolling on her good shoulder. She was still there, if only just, but Mel could tell that admitting the truth of her condition out loud had made it all too real. Knowing that she had no reason to pretend any more, she didn’t. The struggle was harder now, for both of them, and it was never more painful to Mel than when she turned to look at Janice.

They’d been tearing up the road for maybe twenty minutes when Janice summoned strength enough to move. She shifted a little, sat up as straight as she could, and reached out to touch Mel’s shoulder.

“Hey,” she rasped, blinking like a punch-drunk boxer.

Mel didn’t turn away from the road, but the contact warmed her a little and honed her attention. Janice had been so quiet, so lifeless, it frightened her; her fingers weren’t nearly as strong as they should be, but at least they were there. That meant Janice was still there too.

Well. In part, anyway. Mel wasn’t sure if _‘hey’_ really counted as coherence, much less conversation, but it was a darn sight better than the endless strangling quiet. From Mel’s perspective, anything in the world was better than the silence and the horrors that came with it.

“Hey,” she said. She didn’t take her eyes off the road, not because she didn’t trust herself to drive straight but because she wasn’t sure she wanted to see the pallor of Janice’s skin. “You holding on?”

“Course I am,” Janice mustered. There was the ghost of a grin in her voice, but only the ghost. Mel didn’t have to look at her to know it wouldn’t reach her face. “Listen. When we get there…”

“Now, you let me worry about that,” Mel chided. “The last thing we need is for you to keel over from the stress.”

Janice snorted. “Just shut up and listen to me, will ya?”

There it was, that old fire; it warmed Mel down to her toes. “Well, now, if you’re gonna be that way about it.”

“I am,” Janice said, but the smile in her voice grew stronger. “Now listen up, ’cause this is important. When we get there… I mean, after you get me to a doctor or whatever… soon as I’m not dying…”

“Janice…”

Janice, typically, ignored her. "I need you to dump the car.”

Mel blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.” She didn’t even pause. “Get it as far away as you can. Some place they won’t trace it back to us. You understand?”

Mel did not. “Some place like…?”

“Dunno. Couple miles outta town, maybe. Back the way we came, or off in the other direction, whatever you want.” Janice groaned a little, like her whole body hurt. Mel felt her fingers slip off her shoulder, heard the sound as they dropped into her lap. “It’s important,” she went on. “You get rid of the damn thing, dump it some place they’ll find it, and we’re home free. Throw those bastards off the scent, that means we can lie low and catch our breath in peace.” Her voice got hazy as she said that, and when Mel turned to look at her she found her eyes bleary and halfway closed. “Jesus, can you imagine it?”

Mel certainly could not. Peace and quiet, a chance to lay low and stop panicking, maybe even take a bath and get some sleep… those things had become abstract concepts, impossible and so far away that they might as well not exist at all. She’d spent so much time over the past few hours worrying about what she would have to do if they were caught, if Janice bled out and left her all alone, if the worst-case scenario became her truth; she hadn’t let herself stop to think about what might happen if it didn’t.

“Do you really think so?” she asked, breathless and almost believing.

Janice smiled, a dreamy sort of fever-smile. “Yeah, I do.” She made a tiny hiccupping sort of sound. “You and me, sweetheart. Free and easy and not dead. Won’t it be swell?”

Mel touched her forehead. “You’re delirious.”

“Probably,” Janice conceded cheerfully, and let her head drop back down. “You’ll do it, though? Even if I am? Even if you don’t think it makes any sense? You’ll still do as I say?”

“Why, course I will.” Mel would have laughed if she trusted herself not to cry instead. “You’re still in charge, aren’t you?”

Janice beamed. Goodness, it was a beautiful sight. “You bet your ass I am.”

Mel tried to focus on that as she drove. The smile, of course, but the words too, and the simple truth of them. Determined, fixated, she let the world shrink down to that pivotal pinpoint: _She’s in charge. She’s here and she’s alive and she’s in charge. You do as she says. Don’t think, just act._

So she did. The road was long and straight, seemingly endless; there was nothing to distract her, nothing to keep her mind and her thoughts away from the bad places, so she had to do it for herself. Obedience, the one talent that had always come so naturally to her was once again her saving grace. Xena would balk at such a thing, she knew, but for all the preternatural instincts awakening in her veins, Mel Pappas was not Xena, and she had to be herself now. She had to focus, had to hold herself together until they were safe, until Janice was whole and healthy again. And that would not happen if she did things Xena’s way.

_Do as you’re told. Yes ma’am, no ma’am, whatever you say ma’am._

Janice was good at telling her what to do. Even semi-conscious and probably delirious, still she found the strength to take charge and bark orders; it was as if she knew that Mel could not function without her, as if she realised she was the only thing keeping her from falling apart. When this was all over, Mel suspected the guilt would crash down over her like a wave, but until she had the luxury to think about it she could only be grateful, could only hone in on Janice’s voice, weak and wavering though it was, could only use it as a guide to keep her going.

_Stay in your goddamn lane. Ease up on the gas, for God’s sake. Check your rear-view once in a while, will ya? Jesus Christ, you drive like an old woman._

None of that was the least bit important, and it certainly wasn’t anything she hadn’t told Mel a thousand times already, but neither one of them was foolish enough to think that was why she said it. Fact was, the illusion of normality helped to keep them both in one piece. Janice needed the authority to remind herself that she was still in control, and Mel needed the obedience to stop her from thinking too much or too hard.

It was perhaps another half-hour before she saw the heat haze on the horizon, the heavy artificial cloud of civilisation closing in fast, and when her foggy brain realised what that meant Mel let out a whoop of relief.

“You see that?” she cried, euphoric. “You see it, Janice? We’re real close now.”

Janice didn’t try to raise her head. She was slumped forward, resting her face on the dashboard. Glancing at her, Mel was rewarded with a clear view of her back, the exit wound soaking through the bandage.

“Hallelujah,” Janice mumbled, slurring a little, like she didn’t really understand what Mel was saying.

Mel frowned, anxious. “You still with me?”

“Dunno,” Janice said, with a splash of humour. “You tell me. I look alive?”

Mel couldn’t bring herself to look at her face, so she studied the seat instead. It was dark and the upholstery was stained and wet. She wondered how much of the blood there was Janice’s and how much belonged to its former occupant. Did the blood she’d stemmed in Janice’s shoulder negate the blood she’d drained out of that poor man? Could the two even be measured in the same container?

“Yeah,” she said to Janice, taking a long breath and turning back to the road, to the hope looming hazily on the horizon. “You look great.”

“That’s good.” Janice swallowed a couple of times then moaned heavily against the dashboard. “Jesus, I’d forgotten what it feels like.”

“Looking great?” Mel asked. “Or being alive?”

Janice sat up ever so slightly, then turned her face away. “Wanting to be.”

She laughed a little as she said it, but the sound was shaky and weak, like she was trying too hard not to care. Mel could see through the forced lightness, though, and the thing hiding beneath was not light at all. Knowing what she did about the way Janice lived her life, the way she saw the world around her, it wasn’t much of a surprise; still, given how close she was to the alternative, it felt more like a threat than a tragedy.

“You got a death wish now?” she asked. She tried to sound light, even casual, but she couldn’t manage it any better than Janice could. “You telling me I saved your life for nothing?”

“No,” Janice said. “Nothing like that. Just… you reach a point, I guess, where you don’t much care either way. Those goddamn scrolls were so far out of reach for so long, and it…” She closed her eyes, slumped forwards again, and did not move. “You get so damn exhausted, you know? Sometimes you… sometimes you just wish it would all…”

Mel took one hand off the wheel, reached for her arm. “Now, none of that.”

“Not any more,” Janice mumbled, nodding minutely. “Got the scrolls now.”

Mel thought of Xena, and of Gabrielle. She heard, as though the memory were her own, Gabrielle’s voice saying _“you’re not alone”_ , and she felt as though Xena’s heart were her own as well the flood of affection, of warmth and hope and so many other beautiful things. Xena had all but given up on those things, had all but given up on herself, and then there was Gabrielle, as bright as the sun, telling her that she didn’t have to. Mel remembered it and relived it, experienced it now for the thousandth time and for the very first.

“That’s not all you got,” she said to Janice.

Janice cracked one eye open, and turned her head with some effort to squint at Mel. She frowned at her for a long, weary moment, trying to pierce the words or maybe her face, to break through and find what was underneath, to figure out whether it was true or empty. Just like Xena all those countless years ago, Janice seemed unable to take anything at face value; she needed proof, needed a reason. To someone like Mel, like Gabrielle, the notion of needing proof to find faith was strange and confusing.

Mel felt sorry for Janice, then, because she couldn’t understand, because she probably never would. She would never know what she was capable of, would never see the things she carried within her, faith and hope and bard’s blood. Janice and Gabrielle were separate, split apart from each other like twins separated at birth; perhaps they always would be. Janice hadn’t seen the glimpses that Mel had of their ancestors and their old histories. She couldn’t possibly understand the connection Mel felt when she looked at her, the warmth and the new-old love that she felt bubbling up in the parts of her that still held Xena.

Janice would have to find her own way there, Mel knew. Just like Xena, all those centuries ago, she needed to learn how to let go of her past and herself, how to trust and care and feel. She needed Mel, just like Xena had needed Gabrielle. Just like Xena, she had a lot to recover from, a past to make peace with and a world of scars to heal. Just like Xena, trust and friendship were unfamiliar new ideas, strange and incomprehensible things that upset her and made her angry. Just like Xena, she needed time to realise and accept the good in all that… but just like Gabrielle, when she finally did she would make it so impossibly beautiful.

She couldn’t know any of that. She didn’t carry it inside herself like Mel did, but maybe she saw some hint of it reflected on Mel’s face, because her face softened into a small, strained semi-smile.

“What else is there?” she asked, breathless and low, like she wanted so desperately to believe in something but couldn’t see anything at all.

Mel’s heart broke at the hope in her voice, and it broke again at the hopelessness behind her eyes.

“I don’t know.” It wasn’t a lie, at least not really; their past was not their future, after all. “But I reckon we’ll find it together.”

Janice’s eyes drifted shut again.

“Yeah,” she said, almost to herself. “Maybe we will.”

*

The sun was well and truly up by the time they rolled into town.

It was a quiet sort of place, or so it seemed. The streets were all but empty in that early-morning sort of way, with not a living soul as far as the eye could see. They were dusty and in poor condition, much like the rest of the place, but to Mel it might as well have been the promised land. She had never seen a more beautiful sight in all her life than the little rows of buildings, homes and stores and a quaint little tavern with a rooster painted on the side.

No doubt the locals, when they roused themselves, would have a thing or two to say about a pair of strange-looking women rolling up in a stolen, blood-soaked car, but Mel didn’t care a whit about their sensibilities. Here was civilisation, at least by some definition of the word, and that meant they would find help.

“What’s a hospital look like round these parts?” she wondered aloud.

Keeping her face pressed to the dashboard, Janice grunted.

“Won’t find one here,” she mumbled, not bothering to look up and check for herself. “Too small. Not enough people. Doctor, maybe.”

The fracturing of her sentences was not lost on Mel. She slowed the car to a crawl, then turned to take a look at her. One hand cupping Janice’s neck, the other steadying herself on the wheel, she said, “You don’t look so good.”

“Doesn’t matter any more,” Janice said. “We’re here now. We’re here.”

And that was that. Mel knew what she was really saying — _‘we’re here, we made it, I don’t need to pretend to be strong for you any more’_ — and it felt like a blow. How long had she been feeling as bad as she sounded and looked? How long had she been driving down her pain so that Mel wouldn’t worry, so that she could focus on getting them here?

It all felt so backwards. Mel was the one who still had the strength in her body, so why was Janice the one who had to pretend? She had been bleeding on and off for hours now, had lost more blood than Mel had ever seen in her life; it wasn’t right that she still had to be the strong one even when she wasn’t, just because Mel was too much of a darn coward to step up and do it herself.

“You don’t gotta pretend,” she whispered, feeling wretched and regretful. “My goodness, Janice, if you were feeling…”

“Shut up,” Janice said. Her voice was heavy and sort of thick; she sounded like she was trying to talk through a mouthful of water. With obvious difficulty, she lifted her head maybe an inch or two off the dashboard. “We’re here,” she repeated, lower this time. “No sense in getting all misty-eyed and stupid about it now.”

“Well, now, I don’t…” She trailed off with a weary sigh. “Yes, ma’am.”

Janice nodded. She braced with her good arm against the dash, holding her body upright by sheer force of will, and squinted through the dust-smeared windshield. Mel tried to follow her gaze, to figure out where she was looking, but she didn’t even really know what to look for. Her talent for languages was mostly limited to the ancient ones; the symbols and half-familiar letters scribbled on the sides of the buildings here were about as illegible to her as Gabrielle’s scrolls would be to the average layperson. Not for the first time, she felt well and truly out of her depth.

So, giving up hope on finding anything useful outside the car, she turned and looked at Janice instead. Sweaty and shivering, her eyes fever-bright and her skin all but translucent, she looked almost unnatural, like a spectre from the scrolls. Mel wondered what Gabrielle must have felt the first time she saw Xena like this, fresh out of a fight with blood pouring out of some wound or another. Xena, much like Janice, had done it a thousand times before they met, but Gabrielle, like Mel, had surely never seen anything like it before. Mel marvelled again at how completely their positions had reversed.

Her memories came through Xena’s eyes, though, not Gabrielle’s, and that made all the difference. Xena would always pretend to be better than she was. She would hide her grimace in a grin, shrug and smile and hold her spine just a little too straight, smother the suffering with the rhythm and routine of wiping down her sword or polishing her armour; she would do whatever it took to keep Gabrielle from seeing the ugliest parts of what she’d done and what had happened, but Gabrielle was never fooled, not even for a moment. She saw through it every time, and Mel remembered the way she would blanch, the way her eyes would go wide and her voice would as the realisation hit.

 _“How bad is it?”_ she whispered once, very early in their time together. Xena sighed and said, _“Do you want the easy answer or the honest one?”_

Janice never said that to Mel. She never gave her the chance to ask, never even allowed for the possibility, not even once. Not until she had no choice, until Mel was in the middle of a meltdown and nothing else in the world would pull her out of it. Mel had asked so many times, but over and over again Janice insisted it was nothing to worry about. Again and again and again, she said it, right up to the moment that Mel was paralysed and cut through by the sight of someone else’s blood, by the weight of her own terrible deeds, until the truth really was the only option. It was only then, when she knew Mel wouldn’t listen to anything else, that Janice finally confessed.

That made Mel angry. It made her want to stop the car and shake her boneless, but she didn’t because even now the worry was stronger. Even now, here and so close to safety she could almost taste it, the fear clung closer than the anger.

“Would it have killed you…” she started, then instantly regretted the choice of words. “Would it have really been so darn terrible to just tell me the truth from the get-go? I could’ve taken it, Janice. I could have…”

Janice didn’t answer. She just lurched forward in her seat, pointed a shaking finger at one of the buildings and said, “There.”

Mel swung the car in the direction she indicated, but refused to sit back and let the subject slide.

“I killed for you,” she said. “I traded in their lives for yours, like it was my God-given right, like I had any place doing that sort of thing. Now, don’t you think I had a right to know just what I was playing with? Don’t you think I deserved to know how bad it really was for you? Lord have mercy, don’t you think I earned that much?”

“What I _think_ …” Janice said. Her voice was razor-sharp, so she swallowed and tried to soften. “What I think, Mel, is that we’re here. What I think is that I’m going to go inside now and get patched up by someone who doesn’t faint at the sight of blood. What I think is that you are going to dump the car just like I told you to, and then we’re going to lay low for a while and everything will be all right. That’s what I think.”

She said it so calmly, so quietly. How in the world could Mel counter that? How in the world could she push her side of the argument when Janice had the right of it. They _were_ here, less than a stone’s throw away from the help she so desperately needed, and what kind of a monster would drag this out any longer than she needed to? This little talk, difficult though she knew it would be, could surely wait a few hours at least.

And so, with a tired, only slightly frustrated sigh, she cut the engine and the conversation.

“You want me to take you in?” she asked.

Janice huffed a dry, rasping laugh. “You know the language?”

Mel hung her head, answering without words.

 _I wasn’t offering to talk to the fella,_ she thought, though she kept the sullenness to herself. _The good Lord knows, them bullet holes tell the story well enough without no help from me. I just wanted to hold your darn hand for a minute or two before they take you away and put you back together again. Is that so much to ask for, after everything we’ve been through? A moment of contact, Doctor Covington. A moment of humanity. Is that really so much to ask for?_

It saddened her more than she could say, that Janice either couldn’t understand that or else chose not to. 

Sighing, Mel touched her arm. She felt hollow and lost and razed, and she hated that this was all she would get, the smallest substitute for what she really wanted.

“I don’t wanna just up and leave you,” she said. It wasn’t nearly enough. “Not like this.”

“Then come back,” Janice said simply. Her eyes were locked on the building, pupils dancing dizzily. “I’m not going anywhere, Melinda.”

Well, Mel was certain that was true, but she doubted it would be for want of trying. It was fate and a wayward bullet that had clipped Janice’s wings, not the desire to settle down and wait for someone like Mel Pappas to stick around or come back to her side. Now, Mel could be as deluded as anyone given half the chance, but even she couldn’t trick herself into thinking it was for her sake that Janice would wait.

Briefly, she wondered what would happen when Janice was well, when her shoulder was healed and she really didn’t need Mel for anything. Would she try again to convince Mel to leave, or would she take matters into her own hands, borrowing or stealing someone else’s truck and riding off into the sunset before Mel could even get a word in?

“You better not,” Mel said. She wasn’t really talking to that vision of the future, but she supposed she might as well be. “I didn’t put myself through all that just for you to disappear on me, you hear? So when I get back, you better be here.”

Janice blinked. She wasn’t expecting that, Mel could tell. The ultimatum itself, or the uncharacteristic sharpness in her voice. Combined, they brought her back to herself.

“I’ll tell the doc to chain me to the bed,” she said, with her usual trying-too-hard lightness. “That work for you?”

Not waiting for an answer, she threw open the door, stepped out onto the dirt road, and promptly fell over.

Mel watched her stumble and tumble, paralysed for a long, embarrassing moment. She hadn’t expected that, hadn’t anticipated that the last leg of the journey would have left Janice so weak and helpless. Such was her surprise — and the immediate, inevitable horror — that it took her a good long while to shake off the feeling, find her senses, and clamber out to help.

Janice was swearing, dirt and gravel stuck to her face as she tried to right herself, but her limbs didn’t have any strength left in them at all. Under normal circumstances — too much liquor or too much sun, not enough water or common sense, any one of a dozen reasons for such a thing — the sight of her flailing and sulking might almost be comical. But this was a far cry from normal, and these particular circumstances made Mel’s blood run cold.

She eased Janice upright, one arm locked around her waist, and helped her to lean back against the car. “My goodness, you’re as weak as a kitten.”

“Like hell I am.”

Mel rolled her eyes. _Stubborn mule,_ she thought, with almost as much fondness as frustration.

“Stay here,” she said. “Try not to move too much. I’ll go fetch the doctor, and we’ll—”

“I can do it myself,” Janice whined.

Mel clucked her tongue. “Now, I believe I said ‘stay here’.”

Not that she needed to make it an order, really; she didn’t know much about blood loss or pain or the rest of it, but she knew that Janice didn’t have the strength to defy her. There was nothing left in her at all; try as she might, she couldn’t even hold her head up, much less her whole darn body. Still, because she still couldn’t bear the thought of being dependant, she struggled to the very last.

“Mel _in_ da.” The name was a whine. “I don’t need your goddamn—”

“Hush yourself!” The ferocity startled them both; Janice’s mouth snapped shut, and Mel felt her own body twitch. “We’ve come too far for you to go messing it all up with that fool-headed stubbornness of yours. Now you sit there, and you stay still and let me fetch the doctor. For once in your life, Janice, let someone tell you what to do.”

Janice glared like a gorgon. “Melinda, I swear to God…”

“Well, now, you might as well,” Mel quipped, “because He’s the only one who’ll listen.” Unable to help herself, she leaned in to pat Janice on the cheek. “Now you sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Janice fidgeted, looking intensely uncomfortable.

“You better be,” she mumbled, then immediately flushed red.

*

Language barrier or no, communicating the situation was no challenge at all.

It helped, she supposed, that her appearance said a great deal on her behalf. Exhausted, bedraggled, her clothing all torn and dirty, every inch of her stained with someone else’s blood… she could scarcely imagine the look on her face as she staggered into the tiny waiting room, begging brokenly for help. She didn’t even try to speak their language, but apparently that word — _‘help!’_ — was universal; the doctor dropped what he was doing at the sight of her, and followed her outside without hesitation.

Outside, still slumped against the car where Mel left her, Janice took over. Her body’s weakness hadn’t reached her voice just yet, and she spoke the native language as well as if it were her own. Mel only understood brief snatches what they were saying, Janice and the doctor, but she recognised the comprehension on both sides, the way he nodded, the way she sagged with relief, the way he bent to study her wound. They both knew what was going on, she could tell, and for the first time since she stumbled into that tent Mel found that she didn’t care a whit that she herself did not.

“Thank the Lord…” she whispered, shaky with relief.

Janice cocked her head, teeth bared. “Uh huh,” she muttered. “Because He’s the only one who’s gonna listen, right?”

Mel winced. She couldn’t really tell whether Janice was joking or not, but either way she didn’t want to argue. “You’re gonna be okay,” she said gently. “I reckon that’s worth a touch of gratitude, don’t you?”

“We’ll see,” Janice said, then let the subject slide. She leaned in real close, and dropped her voice to a low, serious whisper. “Gun’s under the dash. If they get to you before you ditch the car, don’t hesitate. Not even for a second. You hear me? You get the shot, you take it.”

Mel nodded, though she knew in her heart that it wasn’t as simple as all that. Xena’s instincts were formidable and frightening, and the gun was a terrible burden when she had it in her hands; she knew that she was capable, that having done it once made it almost sickeningly easy to do it again. But without Janice there to motivate and encourage her, without the certainty that it was _‘them or us’_ , without those cloudy, feverish eyes boring into hers… well. Would the warrior princess’s memories really be enough without someone to protect?

She didn’t mention that, of course. Janice had never been a friend to the truth, and why ruin a nice moment with something so unwelcome?

“I will,” Mel said, pouring everything she had into the lie.

For just a second, maybe even less than that, she was sure she saw Janice relax. It was just a flicker, barely enough for Mel to be sure it had happened at all, but it was like the peeling back of a layer, like she was revealing some little piece of herself she’d kept hidden and locked away. Mel didn’t really know what it was, couldn’t break through all the other layers to reach it in the split-second before it disappeared again, but she saw just enough to recognise that it was significant, that it meant something. A hint, if only a small one, that maybe she cared a little too.

Mel took it, graceful and wordless. She leaned in, pressing a warm kiss to Janice’s cold cheek, then stepped back to let the doctor take over. He was tall and much stronger than either one of them, and he had no difficulty hoisting Janice up and into his arms despite her innumerable protests. Mel supposed he was used to dealing with uncooperative patients; no doubt a middle-of-nowhere little town like this had no shortage of drive-by road hogs in need of medical attention. Heaven only knew what terrible things a professional like that had seen in his lifetime, to the point that he scarcely even seemed to notice that both of the car seats were soaked in blood.

She watched as he carried her inside, the two of them arguing heatedly in a language she didn’t speak. She longed to follow, already feeling like an outsider in her own body, but she knew better than to try. She had made a promise, and she would see it through no matter how far it strayed from her own personal feelings.

It was the last thing in the world she wanted, leaving now on some silly little errand while Janice hung by a thread in someone else’s care, but this business with the car was important to Janice and that made it important to Mel as well. She had no idea whether Janice was right or just plain delirious, whether dumping the darn thing really would throw their pursuers off their trail, but it was surely better than waiting for more of the same. As pointless as it felt to Mel, Janice had been doing this a whole lot longer, and she knew this game like the back of her hand. The only thing Mel knew was how to do as she was told, and so she did.

Though she’d spent hours behind the wheel by this point, and though it felt like so much more, still she felt a sick thrill of panic when she keyed the ignition all by herself. She felt like a fraud, a criminal, like any moment now someone would come tearing out of the darkness to check her for a license she did not own and never had. Though Janice had been all but useless for the last leg of their journey, still somehow Mel found that she felt lost and inept without her.

She drove slowly, not wanting to draw attention to herself, not wanting to push her inexperience any further than she absolutely had to. The car rumbled a little this time, juddering and unsteady in a way it surely wasn’t just before; it was like the darn thing could sense that she was alone now, as though it knew she was uncomfortable. Was it so obvious, she wondered, that her confidence was tied to Janice being by her side?

The gun rattled under the seat, loose and probably very dangerous, but Mel couldn’t bring herself to pick it up and slip it onto her belt. She didn’t trust herself to even touch it.

It was such a strange little thing, the gun. To kill so brutally, so ruthlessly, and yet not have a drop of blood on it when the deed was done. Mel had more than her share of the stuff covering her hands and her skin, but most of it didn’t belong to the men she’d killed. It was Janice’s blood, the blood she’d fought to still and stem and stop; it should have made her proud, being covered in that sort of blood, because it meant she had tried to help, but it didn’t. It reminded her that she was supposed to be covered in the other kind, the kind she’d spilled and shed, the kind she’d taken by force. She couldn’t bear to pick up the gun now, to hold it up to the light and watch it gleam so prettily, so illusory, so perfectly pristine.

“Well, you’re not, she said bitterly. Without Janice distracting her with orders and insults, the horror in her head was too loud to ignore; the only way she could quiet it was by being even louder. “You’re not pristine, and you sure as heck aren’t pretty. You’re ugly, is what you are. You might shine on the outside, but your insides are dark and twisted. You’re an evil, awful, _ugly_ thing.”

The gun didn’t answer. But then, was it really the one she was talking to?

She drove perhaps a mile or two out of town, doubling back the way they came and then veering to the east, coasting with the sun in her eyes and the morning heat pooling sweat on her brow. She didn’t know how far she was supposed to go, what counted as ‘throwing them off the scent’; Janice was less than specific and Mel wasn’t entirely sure she trusted her own instincts to fill in the blanks. Here and all on her lonesome, the world suddenly seemed almost endless.

She changed her clothes when she stopped, abandoning the torn-up, filthy mess of her prior outfit on the front seat. Let the rips and the stains stand as a message for whatever fool stumbled across it in the days to come; let them wonder what might have become of the woman in the torn skirt and blood-soaked blouse.

It felt starkly symbolic, stripping down in the middle of nowhere, casting off the trappings of her old life, the clothes that had brought her here, stained and sullied and ruined beyond repair. More symbolic still was the way she hesitated over her new outfit, fumbling for something with just the right feel, something cleaner and tighter and a little less familiar, something between the version of herself that no longer existed and the one still struggling to be born.

She couldn’t undo what she’d been forced to do in the night, couldn’t put on a clean soul like she could a clean skirt, but at least she could make herself look the part. At least she could cling to the illusion of purity. Whatever else this new life might strip from her, it wouldn’t take that.

Hauling their things back to town, what little they hadn’t left in the truck, was not an easy task with no wheels to share the burden, and it was even harder all on her lonesome. Janice had travelled very light, so far as clothing was concerned — frankly, Mel was surprised she owned more than one shirt in the first place — but there were the scrolls as well, and Mel was terrified of touching the darn things. 

She remembered the look on Janice’s face, sober and severe, when she ordered Mel to pick the scrolls over herself, and the disgust when she refused. They were so old, those little pieces of parchment, and so fragile. Mel understood their value better than most, thanks to her daddy’s lessons, but that wasn’t what gave her pause. It was the way Janice spoke about them, the way she looked at them. They were her life, her world, her everything; Mel couldn’t even imagine what might happen if she harmed the darn things by accident.

She held them close and walked slowly, the rest of their things slung over her back as best she could manage. It took her much longer to limp back to town than she’d expected from driving in the opposite direction; laden down with their things, and with nothing but the long dusty road to keep her company, her mind began to wander again. A clean skirt and a pair of sensible shoes might ward off some of the physical discomfort, but they had little effect against memory; Mel’s was more vivid than most, and it was utterly unrelenting.

In its own way, the thinking was more of a torment than the long walk, and by the time she made it back to town she was just about ready to drop where she stood. Frankly, given the weight of everything she’d done it was a miracle she hadn’t done so already.

Feeling like a sleepwalker, dazed and delirious and floating beyond her own body, she sat herself down on the sidewalk outside the doctor’s place. She didn’t have the strength to drag herself inside, and in any case she didn’t think she had the courage to face what might be bad news.

It was a strange, unexpected thing, bracing herself for the worst. At her core, Mel had always been an optimist, maybe even an idealist, but scarcely a day in the company of Janice Covington had taught her more about pessimism and defeatism than she could ever have imagined. Her heart wanted to believe that Janice was okay, that she was whole and healthy and back to her old self, that an hour or two with a doctor had made her as good as new, but the rest of her had seen first-hand the price to be paid for such cock-eyed optimism. She knew better than to expect that now, and so she could not bear to hope.

She sat there on the sidewalk for what felt like weeks, drifting in and out of an exhausted half-doze and conjuring up impossible visions of Xena and Gabrielle, of kindness and compassion and love, of a bond that ran deeper than a bard’s words or a warrior’s weapons.

It was a kind of torment, remembering the kind of love she’d never experienced for herself, feeling those memories mix and merge with her image of Janice; the woman was a near-perfect stranger, really, but when Mel thought of her now she found that she couldn’t separate Xena’s feelings from her own. Janice was so unlike Gabrielle and so much like Xena, and Mel felt so utterly out of her depth in knowing all three of those people so intimately. She felt like so much more and so much less than she was.

Some time later — a few hours, maybe, though it felt like a lifetime — the door to the building creaked open and a slender young hand dropped down onto her shoulder. Mel jolted alert, Xena’s reflexes flaring up inside her all over again. It took more self-restraint than she wanted to admit to keep her hands where they were, to keep from drawing Janice’s gun and pointing it at whoever was foolish enough to touch her without permission.

The instinct passed as quickly as it came, thank the Lord. Her pulse slowed, her shoulders slumped, and her vision blurred and then cleared. Looking up, she saw not another nameless faceless gunman but a young woman, a receptionist or a secretary perhaps, with softness in her eyes and patience in her posture. She waited with perfect stillness while Mel tried to relax, silent as the moment bled itself out, and then she smiled the most radiant, impossible, breathtaking smile Mel had ever seen. Mel didn’t need to ask the question to know the answer — it was right there in that smile, relief and quiet joy — but she did just the same because she wanted to hear it said.

“Is she all right?”

The young woman nodded. When she spoke, it wasn’t in English, but still somehow Mel understood what she was saying, the words taking shape like the answer to a riddle she didn’t remember hearing.

_“Yes ma’am, she’s well. She’s sleeping but she’s well. No ma’am, she won’t die today.”_

Well. What else could she do in the wake of such news, if not burst into tears?

*

She stayed there like that for a long time, weeping and coming back to herself and reexperiencing the moment and weeping again.

 _It wasn’t all for nothing,_ her heart cried, and then she wept again. _She’s alive, I’m alive, we’re alive. Thank the Lord, it wasn’t all for nothing._

It was a long, long time before she found find the strength to stand, and it was longer still before she found the courage to venture inside the building, to verify the truth for herself. Still, even now, there was a part of her that couldn’t bear to believe in what she’d heard, that was so afraid of feeling the world tilt and shift, of the ground cracking open under her feet and plunging her head-first into a place of nightmares. _What if the girl was wrong? What if I didn’t understand properly? What if…_

In the end, it was desperation as much as hope that brought her to the little room, that made her look down on Janice’s face. She had to see for herself if the truth really was true.

It was. Janice lay stretched out on her back, her face still and lineless as she slept. Mel felt a blush touch her neck, struck by an unexpected sense of voyeurism. Janice was so vulnerable like this, exposed and open in a way she would never have allowed if she were awake, if she had a say in the matter. Mel felt like she was intruding on something that wasn’t hers to take, stealing a gift intended for someone else. Janice was so particular about what Mel was allowed to see, stubborn and bull-headed and so full of pride it was a darn miracle she could even hold her head up; she had to crawl almost to the brink of death before she’d accept the possibility that she was hurt at all. Who was Mel Pappas to steal a look at her sleeping?

She did, though. Lord forgive her, she did, and the sight of Janice lying there like that, so still and unaware, breathing freely for the very first time since Mel walked into that darn tent, ripped the heart clean out of her.

At long last, she’d gotten a little of her colour back. After the stillness, the vulnerability, that was the first thing Mel noticed. She looked like herself again, her face weary and taut but _hers_ , and it was only now, looking at her like this, that Mel realised how weak she’d become in those last few hours. That pinched, pale strain, the pain leeching the life out of her as surely as the blood… it had become so natural, so darn normal that Mel had all but forgotten the powerful, arrogant woman underneath.

She saw her again now, at rest, and it was as though all that weakness had bled away completely. Here was the woman who had swaggered into that tent, who had saved Mel from a trio of thugs and told her to go home; here was the woman Mel had followed to the ends of the Earth, the woman Mel would follow to far worse places if given half a chance. Goodness, what a difference a little sleep could make.

It wasn’t just the sleep, of course. Her shoulder had been treated and bandaged again, the work done properly and by a doctor who knew what he was doing; it was a far cry from Mel’s clumsy makeshift tourniquets, and for a long moment she couldn’t stop staring at it. The gauze was clean, crisp and white, unstained and lovely. The skin around it was pink again, warm but not hot to the touch; Mel gasped her relief, and let her palm lie flat across the surface.

All those things together painted the portrait of someone very young. Awake and lit up, Janice was lined and worn, wrung out by the life she’d had thrust upon her; now she seemed almost soft, unburdened, if only while she slept, of all those years of pain and pride.

“Goodness,” Mel heard herself whisper. The word echoed in the empty room, like prayers in a church. “You’re as beautiful as she ever was.”

The thought came from far away, across space and time and everything in between; she felt it so deeply, so completely, but at the same time she knew that it was not hers to feel.

Once again, Xena’s memories overrode her own, but this time they felt like a gift; at long last, they were sharing something that didn’t hurt, something as beautiful as the woman they both remembered. It seemed almost like an apology of sorts, penance on Xena’s part for the grief and trauma that came with her darker impulses.

 _It’s not all like that,_ she seemed to be saying, filling Mel’s heart with warmth and peace. _Give it time, and you’ll see how wonderful it can be._

Mel wasn’t sure if she could believe that right now, but she had never felt anything so pure or so intense as the feeling that washed over her as she watched Janice sleeping. For that, if nothing else, she was thankful.

She was grateful, too, that Janice hadn’t heard her speak. Sleeping deeply, her eyelids fluttering, she was as oblivious to Mel’s thoughts as Mel was to her dreams.

It was better that way, Mel knew, at least for now. Janice wasn’t ready to see what Mel felt, to understand where it came from and how deep it ran, and Mel wasn’t comfortable enough to share it yet anyway. It was still so new, a glimmering spot on the horizon, barely visible even to her, a glimmer of treasure she wasn’t brave enough to hunt just yet. She would make it there in time, she was sure, but for now it was as distant and unreachable as the sun on the horizon. For now, at least, it couldn’t be more than this, a thought and a whisper, private and hers alone.

She stood there for a long time, just watching and feeling letting her breath catch Janice’s rhythm. Someone brought her a chair at one point, seeming to sense that they wouldn’t be getting rid of her any time soon, and Mel pulled it as close to the bed as she could.

Her joints ached as she sat down, and that was the last thing she really remembered. She didn’t remember the moment her head dropped down onto her shoulder, the moment it became too heavy to hold up. She didn’t remember the fatigue finally crashing down, didn’t remember the blessed, blissful silence that followed. The awe and the horror and everything else just seemed to fade away, drowned under the weight of the exhaustion like surfers pulled under the world’s biggest wave. They couldn’t fight it, and neither could she.

She didn’t remember her eyelids drooping, didn’t remember blinking in a futile feint at keeping herself awake. She’d spent so much of the last few hours wishing she could sleep, but suddenly all she wanted was one more moment to drink down Janice’s peaceful, rhythmic breathing. She didn’t remember giving up the fight, didn’t remember the moment she joined her in sleep, and if she dreamed she didn’t remember that either.

What she did remember was waking up to a warm hand covering hers, to Janice’s eyes, glittering and glazed, to a husky, whispered, “Hey.”

Mel smiled. She couldn’t help herself. For just a moment, it felt like the whole world was perfect.

“Hey.” Her voice was a whisper too, sleepy and reverent. “How you feeling?”

“Doped.”

She was grinning as she said it, delirious and lopsided and utterly adorable, and Mel couldn’t help the way she laughed. Relief and affection bubbled over into her voice, warm and irrepressible, and she leaned in without a thought to press a kiss to her cheek.

“Well, I should hope so,” she said.

Janice blinked a couple of times, pupils expanding and contracting, like she was struggling to focus. She looked for a moment like she wanted to comment on the display of affection, maybe even to whine about it, but she didn’t.

What she did say, maddeningly typical, was “You do what I told you?”

“Why, course I did,” Mel said. She touched Janice’s forehead and found it warm. After all the shivering and chattering teeth, the chill that wouldn’t be chased away, it was a huge relief. “You’re in charge.”

Janice’s grin widened a little, her eyes clouding over. “I am, ain’t I?”

“You surely are.” Mel wanted to weep again, but she didn’t. She just smiled so wide she worried her cheeks would crack. “Now, why don’t you try and get a little more sleep, hm?”

“Don’t need it,” Janice mumbled, though the clouds in her eyes told a very different story. _Doped indeed,_ Mel thought, and thumbed the curve of her temple. “Don’t need anything.”

“Now, Janice…”

“It’s true,” she said. “Don’t need a damn thing now I got the scrolls in my hands and you watching my back.” She beamed, bright and breathtaking. “You and me, sweetheart. We’re gonna rule the world.”

“Well, now,” Mel said, willing herself not to giggle. “I think you’re getting ahead of yourself just a touch.”

Still, she was beaming too. How could she not, when Janice was looking at her like that, stripped of all the arrogance and the lies and the denial, stripped of everything that made her insist she was fine when she wasn’t, everything that made her power through the pain and the anguish and all the rest of it? How could she not, when Janice was exposed and vulnerable and open, the truths in her head laid as bare as the scars criss-crossing her body?

It awed her, made her feel if only for a moment like maybe there was something of value to be found in all that horror, like maybe she could justify the terrible things she’d done, the blood on her hands and the ruined outfit she’d left in the car, if only for that unfettered, unashamed grin on Janice’s face. Wouldn’t Xena have done far worse to see Gabrielle look at her that way? Wouldn’t she have unmade and remade the whole darn world for her?

The thought struck a sour chord inside her, though, and just like that the moment ended. Remembering Xena’s life, reliving those feelings as her own, the weight of what she was thinking, what she was willing to allow, swelled and grew into something else.

 _You killed two men,_ she reminded herself angrily, _but all of a sudden that’s okay because she’s got some doped-up grin on her face?_

That her immediate answer was _‘yes’_ scared the life out of her. The smile fell off her face, the thought crushing her lungs and her ribs. Was she really so shallow? Was Xena really rooted so deeply inside her now that she could forgive herself the very worst sin?

She didn’t expect Janice, gone as she was, to notice the sudden conflict inside her, but apparently she was obvious enough that even the drugs weren’t enough to obscure it. Janice stopped grinning as well, and the clouds fled her eyes, chased by something sharper. They grew clear, calculating, and though she still slurred as she spoke, still her words carried weight.

“Don’t,” she was mumbling. “Don’t get that way. Don’t let it destroy you.”

“Hush, now,” Mel said automatically. She did not want Janice to strain herself, of course, but far more than that she didn’t want to hear this. She stroked her forehead, trying desperately to soothe her. “Don’t you pay it no mind. It’s all right.”

“No,” Janice said. For a moment, it seemed like she was talking to herself, like she’d all but forgotten Mel was there. “No, it’s not. You don’t understand. You haven’t… you…”

Mel shook her head. “Janice, stop.”

“Listen to me.” Her eyes flooded with water, but she didn’t blink it away. “It’s not blood if it ain’t bad. You understand? If you don’t have a goddamn choice… if they make you do it… if they force you…” Her voice cracked, then shattered. “It doesn’t count. Okay? It doesn’t _count_.”

All of a sudden, Mel was blinking back tears as well. Janice’s hazy, grinning delirium was long gone now, and in its place was something dark and broken, some long-buried horror that Mel had no right to see. Janice wasn’t talking to her; she was lost in her own head, strangled by her own troubled memories, and Mel felt like a burglar, breaking in and ransacking someone else’s pain.

She wanted to run away and hide, tear herself out of this and silence Janice before she realised how much of herself was spilling out, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t stuff the words back into Janice’s mouth now that they were out, and she couldn’t fish them out of her head. Just by hearing them she had been transformed, and she could no more go back from that, could no more undo it than she could scrub the blood from her hands.

Janice’s truth wasn’t hers. It didn’t belong to her. But _oh_ , she wanted to believe it so badly that it made her weep all over again.

“Go back to sleep, Janice,” she whispered, when she finally found her voice again.

Janice shook her head, but Mel only had to look into her eyes to know that the choice wasn’t hers to make. “Don’t need it.”

“Well, I’m sure you don’t,” Mel sighed. “But do it for my sake, all right?”

Janice tried to argue again, but this time she couldn’t even hold her head up. Doped as she was, it seemed that the exhaustion had its claws in her, and Mel watched with a sad little smile as she dropped back down onto the pillow and let her eyes drift slowly closed.

“Stick around.” For the first time since they met, it was not a question. “Need you to…”

But that was as far as she got. Whatever cocktail of medication she had inside her did its job, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Mel would probably never know what she wanted to say, but she didn’t much care.

She’d stuck around this far, hadn’t she? She’d stick around for anything.

*


	5. Chapter 5

*

They stayed there like that, resting and recuperating, for a long while.

Janice, doped up on medicine and still on the mend, slept deeply and didn’t wake; she didn’t even stir, and Mel felt her own head grow heavy just from watching her. She was afraid of looking away, afraid of closing her eyes for just a moment only to open them again an hour or a day later to find herself alone and Janice dead or vanished. She was afraid of waking to find that this was a dream, that everything she’d done was was all for nothing after all.

She was afraid of so many things, and not all of them rational, but her exhaustion was more powerful than her fear, and her strength had jumped ship long ago.

The doctor staged an intervention about half an hour after Janice fell back to sleep. No doubt he’d seen this sort of thing a few thousand times before, anxious men and women unwilling or unable to leave their loved ones’ sides, and he offered her the use of a spare cot on the opposite side of the room. Embarrassed but grateful nonetheless, Mel accepted, but not without the proviso that he dislodge her if someone more deserving came in.

She stretched herself out on her side, facing Janice’s cot, and murmured her thanks when the doctor laid a thin blanket over her shoulders. The cot was narrow and short, not really built for someone of her particular physique, but after so long in cramped vehicles it might as well have been a four-poster bed.

It took her a while to relax, though, anxious about what she might miss and a little frightened of the nightmares that might lurking just below the surface; she had been through too much in the last twenty-four hours not to expect them sooner or later, and she would sooner not have to deal with them in public. Still, for all her best efforts to resist the inevitable, it was intoxicating to be out of danger and able to relax, and when the drowsiness spread itself out over her, far warmer than the blanket, she found herself helpless and floating.

 _It’s all right,_ a voice whispered in her head, so familiar now it felt like her mother’s. _You’re safe here, and so is she._

Blessedly, the nightmares didn’t come. Maybe her mind hadn’t processed it all just yet, or else she was simply too darn exhausted. Either way, her sleep was deep and blessedly dreamless.

She woke many hours later, groggy but well-rested, to the sound of Janice swearing at the top of her lungs.

Mel bolted upright, groggy and only halfway awake. She had no idea what to expect, but naturally assumed the very worst; as safe as she’d thought they were, Xena’s instincts were still sharper than her own; it would be a long, long time before she remembered how to lower her guard. In any case she’d learned the price of hesitation all too well by now. She didn’t hear any gunshots or threats, didn’t see any immediate danger, but if the last twenty-four hours had taught her anything it was that she could never be sure.

She would just have to accept, it seemed, that this was going to be her life from now on, that keeping company with Janice Covington meant flinching and diving for cover at the least little sound, that she would always be bracing for impact and expecting bloodshed and death even when there was no reason for it. Janice had lived that way her whole life, of course, but up until yesterday Mel could scarcely even have imagined such a thing. Her nerves were already frayed after just one night; what state would she be in after a week, a month, a year of this sort of living?

Acting on instinct — hers or Xena’s, who could tell any more? — she lurched off the bed and ducked underneath. “Oh my goodness…”

Janice, ever alert to sound and motion, honed in on the sound of her voice. Not stopping her string of curses, she whirled around and locked in on Mel’s position like a darn homing missile. Her shirt hung open, only halfway on, and she looked just about ready to kill.

“Melinda!” she yelled, seemingly oblivious to Mel’s hammering heart. “Help me out here, will ya?”

Mel stared up at her, slack-jawed, and did not get up from the floor. “What’s going on?” she squeaked. _And do I really want to know?_

Janice grunted, seemingly annoyed that Mel hadn’t grasped the entire situation in the half-second she’d been away, then spun back around. Mel noted with some confusion that she was still trying, albeit with very little success, to shrug into her shirt.

“Doc’s an idiot,” she grumbled. “Thinks he knows my body better than me. Goddamn jackass.” She spat a string of curses at the poor doctor, then glanced back at Mel. “Tell him I’m fine, would you?”

Blinking furiously, Mel looked from Janice to the doctor and then back again. Was that really all this was about? All the cursing, swearing, carrying on… for what? Janice’s stubbornness? _Lord have mercy, this woman will be the death of me._

With some effort, Mel found her voice. “But you’re not,” she said. “Fine, I mean. You shouldn’t even be out of bed. Janice, you were—”

“I’m _fine_.” Janice glared daggers at her, then whirled back to the doctor and glared daggers at him instead. “He patched me up, I slept it off. It’s been _hours_ , for Christ’s sake. We got places to be.”

The doctor, clearly ill-prepared for a patient as bull-headed and prone to death wishes as Janice Covington, looked to Mel in desperation. He was yelling incoherently in his native language, and Mel didn’t need her translational talents to piece together what he was trying to say. No doubt it was some variation of _‘she’s crazy, you talk to her’_. Though she did not look forward to the latter, Mel certainly couldn’t argue with the former. Janice had a lot of things going for her, but sanity surely was not one of them.

Sighing heavily, Mel scrambled to her feet and tried to smooth down her skirt. The rhythm and routine gave her a little courage, allowed her to summon what little patience had survived the previous night’s adventure.

“Now, Janice,” she said, slow and hopefully calm. “Would it really be such a terrible thing to stay here for another day or two?”

“Yes.” With a final violent tug, Janice got the shirt over her injured shoulder. It must have hurt terribly, though, because she turned as white as a sheet and choked on her breath. “We need to get going. You know that.”

“But I did what you said.” Mel’s brain was still not quite awake; if it were, she would not have been bold or foolish enough to argue. “I left the car. I threw them off the scent, just like you told me. Don’t that mean we’re safe for now?”

Janice didn’t answer. She didn’t say anything at all, to Mel or to the doc, for another long while. Her lips were thin, like she was thinking or maybe trying to rein in her temper; she was swaying a little on her feet, but apparently she’d recovered enough of her strength to shrug off the doctor’s efforts to ease her back down onto the bed. She was barely upright at all, but Mel had spent enough time in her company now to recognise the determination, the near-feverish desperation to prove herself. She was awake and she was coherent; by her somewhat ludicrous definition that meant she was strong again, tough and untouchable. Mel couldn’t understand why it was so gosh-darn important to her, but she had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t for her benefit or the good doctor’s.

“Look,” Janice said at last, low and weighted. “I don’t want to be stuck here any more, okay? Is that a goddamn crime?”

“Well, now, of course not. You know I understand. But—”

“No, you don’t.” She tightened her shoulders. “You want me to spend the next week in bed? That’s fine. I’ll do it. But let me pick the damn bed. For the love of…”

But that was as far as she could get. Drained by either the outburst or the swell of emotion, she slumped against the edge of the bed. Mel let out a worried squeak, reeling against a thousand visions, Xena’s and her own, of gruesome horrible deaths.

“Janice?”

“I’m fine, goddammit!”

Still, though, she stopped arguing, and when the doctor tried again to ease her back down she didn’t struggle. Mel watched, feeling a strange lump rising up into her chest, something she had never felt before but which still somehow felt oddly familiar to her.

“It really bothers you?” she asked, and instantly regretted it. “Being here?”

“Not a goddamn invalid,” Janice gritted out, as though that were any answer at all. “I did my time in hellholes like this growing up. Hospitals and doctors and… Christ, all of it. I did my goddamn time. Now I heal on my own terms.”

“Stubborn fool,” Mel said, and instantly hated herself for it. “What if…”

But that was as far as she could get. The words choked in her throat, as painful as any bullet-hole, and as she struggled to breathe through them she realised it wasn’t really Janice she was worried about.

She’d only caught a few brief glimpses of her body last night, the mosaic of scars and twisting muscle that made up her torso, but she had surely seen enough to know that Janice knew how to take care of herself. It was enough, Mel knew, that she was out of danger now, as well looked-after as anyone could hope for under the circumstances. No doubt she’d stormed out of places like this a thousand times before, and never even stopped to check if she was still bleeding.

It wasn’t about that. Only a fool would waste her strength worrying now that she finally had no reason to.

No. Selfish though it was, this was all about Mel.

The plain fact was, she didn’t want to be in the driving seat any more. She didn’t want Janice’s life in her hands, didn’t want to be the one who had to lean over and check that she was still breathing, didn’t want to have to live with the fear of what might happen if she wasn’t. She didn’t want to have the gun on her belt or sitting in her palms, didn’t want to pass every minute, every second, every heartbeat wondering when she might have to use it again. Mel wasn’t like Xena or Janice; she wasn’t the hero of her own story or anyone else’s, and she’d never wanted to be. She was just a homespun gal from the South who’d had the misfortune of falling onto one of her daddy’s old telegrams, who’d been pricked by curiosity and could never go back.

Mel wanted so desperately to be the Gabrielle of this story, to play the sidekick to Janice’s hero complex. The ‘useless tag-along’ that Janice talked about with so much disdain, the beautiful bright-eyed bard that Xena loved so deeply, that was all Mel had ever wanted for herself. Kind and compassionate and fragile, loving and giving, unable to harm a fly and burdened only with a love of learning… she had spent her life striving for those things; what kind of a darn fool would give up such a noble pursuit by choice? She wanted to help, would give anything in the world just to help, but every time she turned around she saw _help_ twisting into _hurt_.

 _I can’t do that again,_ she thought, feeling the panic start to burn anew in her throat and her chest. _I can’t be the one who has to keep us alive. I can’t take any more lives just to preserve yours or mine. You can’t ask me to do that again. You can’t ask me to be that person again. Not ever again, you hear me? I’m not like her and I’m not like you, and I will not become that way._

“Janice,” she said out loud. Her voice rang out, sharp and wrong, like a bell struck hard enough to crack. “Janice, I’m not going through that again. I know you want out, I do understand that, really I do, but I’m not…” She shook her head. “I _can’t_.”

“Melinda.”

“No. No, don’t you ‘Melinda’ me. Not this time.” She shut her eyes, swallowed down a couple of deep breaths, then opened them again and let them burn into Janice’s. “You stay here. You stay here until you’re well and good and strong, until you don’t need me no more.”

Janice growled, then slowly sat up. She wasn’t swaying any more, but she made no effort to climb back off the bed or resume her efforts to leave. It wasn’t very much of a victory, but at least it was something. Mel didn’t have the strength to argue and hold the poor woman upright at the same time; at least this way, she only had to focus on one.

“I don’t need you now,” Janice was saying, dogged as ever. “The idiot doc patched me up. I’m good to go, Mel. I swear it.” Her expression sobered, and Mel knew what was coming long before she summoned the strength to say it. _Here we go again_. “You don’t want to deal with me like this, the door’s right there. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.”

“Now, that’s not what I…” She sighed. “Janice, please.”

“Mel…”

“Don’t I deserve this one?” Mel asked. The truth of it resonated inside her, lent her a strength that wasn’t quite her own but wasn’t wholly Xena’s either, a peculiar _something_ that slipped like satin between the two of them. “After everything you done put me through yesterday and last night and every darn minute since we met… after everything I did and became for you… Lord have mercy, Janice, wouldn’t you say you owe me this?”

Janice opened and shut her mouth maybe a dozen times, but for a good long while she seemed unable to make a sound.

Mel had never seen her so close to speechless before, not even at her most delirious, her most feverish or helpless or broken. She always had something to say, always had some gosh-darn opinion or some little piece of her pride to preserve. Not that Mel flattered herself that she’d win a victory here, of course, but it was almost enough of one that she’d gotten Janice to consider it, that she had brought such a stubborn, angry young woman to the point of silence, that she had made Janice look, if only for a second or two, beyond her own hurts and her own wants.

Finally, obviously hating herself, Janice turned her glare back on the doctor. Her eyes, fixed tight on his like a sniper’s scope, flashed a deadly warning.

“Don’t suppose you got a private room in this hellhole?”

*

The doctor did not have a private room, of course, but he also did not have any other patients, so it worked out well enough.

Well enough for Mel, at any rate. She had never been particularly shy about such things, and had never balked at the idea of company. Janice, being both unaccustomed to and generally unappreciative of other people, hated being exposed, and all the more so when imagined she was weak. She wanted to be hidden away, isolated and alone; it wasn’t privacy she wanted, at least not really, but solitude. Feeling trapped and helpless, stuck in someone else’s bed and sickened by the cloying disinfectant smell, she just wanted to be alone.

Blessedly for everyone involved, she healed pretty fast. Whether that was a natural talent of hers or simply the by-product of her trademark stubbornness, Mel was quietly amazed at how swiftly she improved. By evening, she had most of her strength back, and she put it to good use, scowling and swearing like a sailor every time the doctor stopped by to check on the wound or offer pain medication. Mel was not surprised that Janice insisted she didn’t need any more ‘goddamn drugs’, nor was she surprised that she accepted them anyway.

“Waste of time,” Janice griped, a day or two into their stay. She was in a sour mood, and would be until the latest dose kicked in. Mel knew this rhythm by now; for someone who insisted she wasn’t in any pain any more, Janice sure got cranky between pills. “And money.”

“Don’t you worry about the money,” Mel said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“I’m not a goddamn charity case.”

“I don’t recall ever saying you were.”

Janice growled and grumbled a little more, then spent the next half-hour kicking miserably at her blankets. Mel knew that she was feeling better, for all her toddler-like tantrums, but she was still afraid to suggest that they leave. Janice might have been exaggerating when she accused Mel of wanting her to stay in bed for a week, but Mel would surely appreciate it if she did. She had almost forgotten what this felt like, peace and quiet and not being afraid for her life. The memory of those nightmarish gunshots never quite fled her thoughts, but at least here she was not in constant fear of the next one.

When she’d sulked herself satisfied, Janice sat up and said, “You know, you’re a noisy sleeper.”

Mel blinked, baffled by her choice of subject matter. “Well now,” she said, cautiously optimistic. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard any complaints in that department before.”

“Well, you’re getting one now.”

Mel shook her head, amused and affronted in almost-equal measure. “You sure you’re not just sensitive?”

Janice glared. “You _snore_ ,” she said, like that was the worst crime in the world. “You really want to stick around, you’re gonna have to work on it.”

“Maybe if you work on that attitude of yours,” Mel countered, automatic and without thinking.

She expected Janice to grunt and scowl some more, maybe even throw out another crude insult, but she didn’t. She just said, “Yeah,” real quiet-like, then lay back down and didn’t speak again for a long while.

Mel watched her, trying to pierce the shadows on her face. She felt uncomfortable, awkward and anxious, and didn’t really know what to say. She wondered if Janice felt bad about everything that had happened, guilty for having put Mel into such a terrible position in the first place. The part of Mel that was still reeling, still horrified and traumatised, couldn’t help feeling a little vindicated at the idea, even vindictive.

 _Well, yes_ she thought, indulging a moment of uncharacteristic spite. _I reckon you oughta feel a mite guilty. You said we could keep my innocence intact. You said we’d make it out in one piece. You said that there gunshot wound weren’t bad. Lord, you said so many things that weren’t never true, and then you had the gall to look me in the eye and admit it was bull. Darn it, if I had any sense, I’d take your advice and walk out right now._

The rest of her, the bigger part, knew that it wasn’t as simple as that. She knew that Janice never wanted to be shot, that the helplessness and weakness had hurt almost worse than the darn bullet. She’d seen it for herself, again and again and again. Janice would never have spread her life out on the ground like that, would never have let it sit in someone else’s hands by choice. Looking at her now, sulking and silent and miserable, Mel wondered if perhaps there was a part of her that secretly wished the bullet had taken her life after all. Didn’t she say as much herself? _“I’d forgotten how it feels… being alive… wanting to be…”_

Mel shook off the thought. It made her sad. More, it tapped into the part of her that held Xena’s memories, that knew with an intimacy that broke her heart how dark a person had to be to think that way. What a world it must be for people like that; how long before she understood it just as well herself?

“You’re a lot like her,” she heard herself say. The words hung there on the too-clean air, each one a bullet just waiting for a clear shot. “Xena, I mean.”

Janice didn’t open her eyes or sit up. “You heard Ares,” she said. “I’m nothing like her.”

“Well, sure, not in your blood. But in other places, you’re so alike it scares me. Your bones, your heart, your…” She sighed; she wished it wasn’t true, and it hurt all the more because she knew that Janice wished it was. “I seen her soul, Janice, and it’s more like you than me.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s the truth,” Mel said, annoyed and uncharacteristically impatient. “You talk about things I don’t understand, things I don’t rightly want to understand. But the part of me that was her… she does. She don’t need you to explain it like I do, she just knows. She knows what you mean, she knows how you feel, and she understands why. She understands everything, Janice. And through her…”

“Don’t say it.” Janice swallowed hard, a short sharp spasm that looked very painful. “Don’t tell me she’s helping you to ‘understand’ me or whatever. I don’t want that.”

Mel frowned. “You don’t want someone to understand you?”

“I don’t want _you_ to understand me.” Her voice cracked, then grew brittle, like it always seemed to do when she was talking about herself. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you’re the best of us, Mel. And I sure as hell wasn’t kidding when I said you’re not ready to know what a woman has to go through out here, what she has to do to survive. I can’t take back what you had to do back there, but I’ll be damned before I ruin the rest of you.”

“Well, now,” Mel said, real quiet. “That’s not rightly up to you, is it?”

It hurt. It hurt a lot, because even as the words left her mouth she realised that the same was true of herself as well. It wasn’t Janice’s place to decide what Mel could and could not deal with, of course, but then Mel didn’t really get to decide it for herself either. The deeper she fell down this particular rabbit hole, the more she realised it didn’t matter what she thought or felt or wanted, who she was before she stepped into that tent. Her instincts, her talents, weren’t only hers any more; they transformed into something new when Xena’s soul took hold of hers, and it was out of her hands now. What she could do, what she understood, what she felt… more and more, it seemed, they were as much Xena’s as her own. And she had no more choice in that than Janice did.

Janice swallowed again, struck by the words and perhaps their deeper, more personal meaning. “Jesus, Mel…”

“No. No, don’t you take that tone with me.” She closed her eyes for a moment, found some of Xena’s courage, her strength. It frightened her, the surge of power inside herself, but it gave her what she needed as well, coated her tongue with a language she didn’t know she possessed. “What happened back in that tomb changed me. It made her a part of me. Now, whether I like it or not, that’s something I gotta live with. And what happened back there on the road… goodness, that would’ve happened either way. Me being Xena didn’t stop you getting shot, and it didn’t stop those boys coming after us. One way or the other, I would’ve had to take that shot.”

Janice swore. “You think I wanted to? You think it didn’t kill me to make you do that for me?”

“I know it did,” Mel said. “But that don’t mean it didn’t kill a piece of me too.”

“Christ.” At long last, and with only a little effort, Janice sat up again. She didn’t look Mel in the eye, didn’t seem really able to look directly at anything, but that didn’t stop the words wrenching out of her like tiny seizures. “I didn’t want any of this. Not for you. The bloodshed, the pain, all the crap that comes with living the way I do, the way Xena did. You deserve better than getting that stuff forced on you like…”

_…like it was forced on us._

She didn’t say that part. Maybe she knew that it would break them both to have it out there and made real. Janice’s life was like a scroll all of its own, her body a canvas with experiences scratched and scrawled and scribbled all over it. She might not have Gabrielle’s talents for poetry, but she held the same power over words that her ancestor did. When she spoke, Mel was transformed.

She became transformed again now, made strong by the truth she couldn’t bear to hear. She crossed over to the bed, took Janice by the arm and said, “It’s already happened.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Saying it, being the one to make it real when Janice could not, transformed her again. “It’s done, Janice. You and Xena… you’re both inside me now. You’ve both changed me. It’s happened, Janice, and you can’t undo it.”

“Goddammit, I can try!”

Her arm tensed under Mel’s fingers. Mel studied the point of contact, struck by how delicate and fragile her fingers seemed next to Janice’s tan lines and bunching muscles. She felt pale and slender and shamefully weak; Janice was the one recovering from a gunshot wound, the one who had been helpless and vulnerable, who had almost died, but Mel was the one who felt that way, who looked down at her own body and could not see the strength she knew was there.

She was right. Whatever Janice might want to think, whatever she might try, Mel knew that it didn’t matter. It _had_ happened, all of it, and neither one of them could take it back.

“I’m a murderer now,” she said aloud, for her own sake far more than Janice’s. “I killed two people. I shot them and I… I took their lives. And it don’t matter one bit that I did it it to save yours or to keep us both safe or anything else. You can’t go back from something like that, Janice. It don’t matter the reason.”

Janice’s arm trembled. “It does matter,” she said in a whisper. “It has to.”

“Not to me.” Mel pulled back a little, tilting her head to look Janice in the eye. Janice tried to look away, but she seemed almost paralysed, taken in by Mel’s gaze in spite of herself. “You and Xena… you got your own way of looking at things. The good Lord knows, I understand that. You were made by pain and circumstances, both of you, and the world has never been a friend to either one of you. But that’s not me. And I just can’t see the world the same way you do. I came out here looking for you because I wanted to do good, because I wanted to help you. I don’t want no grand adventure, no life-or-death struggles or history or ancient gods or any of that stuff. I…” She sighed. “Lord, I just wanted to _help_.”

“And now you’re a murderer.” Janice wet her lips, like she was testing the flavour of the word. “Because I gave you my goddamn gun and Xena gave you her goddamn skills.” She shook her head, angry. “It ain’t right. It ain’t right that you have to run around feeling like crap for something we made you do.”

“Well, no,” Mel agreed sadly. “I reckon it’s not. But it’s the way it is. Don’t much matter that you gave me the gun or that Xena gave me the skills. I’m still the one who did it. And I’m the one who’s gotta live with that. The blood is on my hands. Not yours or Xena’s or anyone else’s. Mine.”

“No.” She was almost pleading, as wide-eyed and hopeful as a child. Mel ached to look at her, almost more than she ached to look inside herself. “God knows, Xena and I have enough on ours already. A little more ain’t gonna hurt either one of us. So you… you let us take this one, okay? My gun, her skills, whichever. Take your damn pick. Just let it be on us.”

Not for the first time, Mel was reminded of Xena. The warrior princess would have done anything, she knew, to protect Gabrielle from the harsh realities of their life together. She tried to keep her safe for so long, worked herself to exhaustion just trying to protect her, but where did all that smothering get them both in the end? Gabrielle’s voyage from innocent little village girl to bard to a warrior in her own right was as inevitable as Xena’s own. It had just taken a different route.

Xena couldn’t have kept the blood from touching Gabrielle’s skin or soul any more than Janice could keep it from touching Mel’s in a moment of desperation and necessity. It was the price to be paid, Mel supposed, for throwing in with people who were so bloodied themselves. Xena was a warrior forged in fire, and Janice wasn’t so very different; less fire nowadays but more gunpowder, and didn’t it all amount to the same thing in the end?

They had both suffered to become what they were, and neither one of them trusted in softness or faith. But Mel was like Gabrielle, tender and untouched; when the blood overflowed, when it spilled onto their hands, it seemed so much darker than it did on Xena’s and Janice’s.

“You can’t protect me forever,” she said to Janice. “If I’m gonna stick around with you, I’m gonna get dirty. I’m gonna get blood on my hands and my clothes. I’m gonna see and do and maybe go through some terrible things. That’s gonna happen, whether I want it to or not.”

“It doesn’t have to,” Janice rasped.

“So darn stubborn,” Mel said with another sigh. “It does. Unless you give up everything that ever made you who you are. Unless you change, Janice, I gotta. And we both know you won’t.”

Janice hung her head. She didn’t even try to deny it. “God _dammit_.”

“Its gonna happen,” Mel said again, softer. “And I gotta deal with it in my own way. Yours might be Xena’s, but me… I reckon mine is Gabrielle’s. And if she survived it, you gotta trust that I will too.”

“I didn’t even trust you with your own damn name,” Janice reminds her, light but serious. “How the hell am I supposed to trust you with something like this?”

Mel chuckled. She squeezed Janice’s arm, then grudgingly let her go. “Well, now,” she said, “maybe that’s something you oughta work on.”

Janice looked contemplative for a second, then slumped back onto the bed.

“Sure,” she said. Her voice was light, but she did not smile. “Just as soon as you work on that snoring.”

*

Janice’s cabin fever got the best of her by the next morning.

“We done yet?” she asked Mel. Her tone made it pretty obvious that it wasn’t really a question, but still Mel was flattered that she’d asked at all. “We’re wasting time and money.”

“I told you,” Mel said. “You let me worry about—”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll handle the money, right?” She snorted. “Well you can handle it and get us a motel room, if you’re feeling so generous.”

As badly as she wanted to, Mel didn’t try to argue this time. Janice had started the day by refusing painkillers and throwing her pillow at the doctor’s head when he asked if she was sure; Mel suspected another day here would push her temper clean over the edge. Besides, they’d have to leave sooner or later, and experience had taught her that putting it off would only make the moment harder. At least this way they’d all end this in one piece.

She did handle the money, as promised, and from the look of him the doctor wasn’t nearly as sad to see them go as he probably should have been. No doubt there was a little voice quoting the Hippocratic Oath in the back of his mind, pointing out that he ought to keep his patient at least another day or two, but Mel had already learned how exhausting it was to spend any amount of time with a restless, pain-addled Janice, and she did not envy the poor man the litany of multi-lingual insults he’d suffered through their brief stay. Little wonder his self-preservation won out in the end, and Mel could feel the relief pouring off him as he bid her adieu.

Outside, she found Janice blinking up at the sunset and muttering to herself.

“Hate being cooped up,” she was saying, oblivious to Mel’s approach. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.”

Mel smiled. She announced herself with a tactful cough, then closed the space between them.

“I still reckon we should’ve stayed another day or so,” she said. “Weren’t it safe enough there?”

“No such thing as ‘safe’,” Janice said wryly. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? Stick with me and you’ll never be safe again.”

 _My goodness, you can be dramatic,_ Mel thought, but she knew better than to say that aloud. Janice might be glowing with her newfound freedom, but she was still a lit fuse most of the time, and Mel had not yet learned what would push her buttons in a given moment. She didn’t want to annoy her while the wound was still mending, and she certainly didn’t want to upset her before they decided what to do next.

“We gonna head back for the truck?” Mel asked tentatively. “Gather up our gear?”

Janice hummed, mulling it over. “Not just yet,” she said after a beat. “Need to make sure they’ve lost interest before we do anything risky or stupid. The plan hasn’t changed just because we spent a couple of days under lockdown with that jackass Doctor Frankenstein.”

“Now, I really don’t think…”

“Course you don’t.” Janice stretched her neck a little, then sighed. “There’s gotta be some under-the-radar dive in this hole. Some place we can dig in for a few days or so.” She glanced at Mel, eyes narrowed and expression shifty. “Under your name, obviously. Don’t say mine in public.”

“You know,” Mel mused, shaking her head, “I’m starting to suspect you’re paranoid.”

Janice laughed. “Course I am,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.”

Mel had no response to that.

*

They did find an under-the-radar place, though it wasn’t a ‘dive’.

It was an innocuous-looking B&B, a smallish house that didn’t advertise itself too much. Janice beamed at the sight of it, snapping the fingers of her good hand and crowing that the place was ‘just the ticket’. Mel, being only the wallet for this little venture, kept her mouth mostly shut. The place had a pleasant aura, and it seemed out of the way; if it made Janice happy, who was she to have an opinion?

They bunked down together, of course, setting up in a cozy little suite with two beds and a great big bathroom. The luxury was at Mel’s insistence, of course and despite Janice’s protestations; no doubt the good doctor would have been quite content lolling around in the gutter, but in this if nothing else Mel put her foot down. They deserved a little luxury, she pointed out, and in any case she was the one paying.

Janice scowled but let it slide. She took the room in with wide eyes, whistled, and observed without a trace of irony that she’d never seen a place so fancy in her whole life.

She got quiet afterwards, though, like she didn’t realise the confession would affect her until after she got it out. Mel was starting to recognise that particular breed of quiet, the stiffening and the sudden silence, as a marker that they’d touched on something deeply personal. Janice wasn’t bothered by much, but she was afraid of opening up, so she often shut down before she could expose herself and regret it.

Mel didn’t really know how to deal with her when she got that way. Her own instinct was to pry, to seek out the soft spot and push until Janice opened up, but Xena’s memories suggested distance and respect. She understood, yet again, the things that Mel didn’t, and so — because this, like so many other things, was outside her comfort zone — she heeded her and held her tongue.

She sat herself down on one of the beds, watching uneasily as Janice paced the room. She was edgy, almost like a caged animal, seemingly no more comfortable in here than she was back at the doctor’s place. Maybe the room was too big for her, too spacious, or else maybe she just didn’t know how to settle down and relax. She checked the lock on the door, then crossed to examine the windows, then rounded back to the door, over and over and over, until Mel grew dizzy from watching her.

“Do you have to do that?” she said at last. “You’re making me nervous.”

Janice rolled her eyes, and ran a careful hand along the door’s hinges. “Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t stop. “Gotta make sure we’re…”

She didn’t finish, though. _‘No such thing as safe,’_ Mel remembered, and sighed.

“Well, now,” she said. “At least sit down a spell, won’t you? Your shoulder…”

“Relax.” Janice grunted, and gave the gauze a spirited poke. “I know what I’m doing. You have any idea how many bullets I’ve taken?”

“I’m sure I don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, probably not.” Did she have to sound so darn smug about it, Mel wondered. “But trust me, okay? Doc might have been a joker, but he did decent work. It’ll hold and it’ll heal.” She straightened up to look Mel in the eye. “We’re out of the woods, Melinda. You understand?”

Mel did understand, but she wasn’t sure she could really believe it. “If that’s true,” she said, “why won’t you sit down?”

“Because…” Janice stammered a little, then flushed. “Shut up.”

“I see.”

“It’s important, okay?” Janice snapped, bristling. “I’m not about to let those bastards sneak up on me again.”

Mel frowned at her for a long, quiet moment, then whispered, “Us.”

Janice was checking the window again. She didn’t look up. “Huh?”

“Us,” Mel repeated carefully. “They sneak up on you, they sneak up on me too. You’re not the only one here no more.”

“Oh.” Janice shrugged, spun on her heel, and crossed back to the door. “Sure, whatever.”

And that was that, at least as far as she was concerned.

Mel wished it could be so simple for her as well. She wished she could turn off her empathy just by squinting at the door or the window or the walls. But she couldn’t, and every time she heard Janice suck in her breath even just a little, every time she winced or shifted her shoulder and swore, Mel went hurtling right back to that roadside, to the gravel crunching underfoot and the gun in her hand, to the sound of her own breath echoing like an air-raid klaxon inside her head.

What would she do, she wondered, if it did happen again? What if all that obsessive checking amounted to nothing and they woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunshots and screams? What would she do if Janice was shot again, if she was killed? Mel was not afraid of taking a bullet of her own, but she was terrified of being the one who didn’t, of once again being the only thing between Janice and her dying breath.

It was a terrible thing, to be as frightened of saving a life as taking one.

Perhaps she wore some of this on her sleeve, the dread and the horror, the nightmares that were so powerful they hadn’t even reached her dreams yet, because Janice took one look at her face and lurched over to her side in about two steps. Her hand was cool and strong; she touched her arm, and then took her by the wrist.

“You okay?”

Mel took a juddering breath, then shook her head. She was not like Janice, desperately clinging to the illusion of strength like a security blanket. Janice might need it to survive, but Mel never had and she never would. She wasn’t strong, and she’d never expected that she would be. She was a girl for some years, and then she was a lady, and neither of those things had ever been ashamed of being weak.

She valued her intellect, perhaps more than someone from her stock should — _“that’s your doing,”_ her mama would chide her daddy, and he would beam like that was the greatest thing he’d ever accomplished — but not her physicality. Tall though she was, she’d never deluded herself she could be intimidating or powerful. Janice could stop a tank with her glare; Mel had trouble enough stopping a stolen car with her foot on the brake. Why pretend she was anything different?

“I don’t rightly know,” she said. “It’s a lot to…”

“Yeah, I know.” Janice’s chest rose and fell rapidly. “It’s not…”

There was a tremor in her voice, but it didn’t touch her body. Her hand was still as strong as steel where she held Mel’s wrist, and though she was breathing very hard she looked utterly composed. Mel wondered whose benefit that was for, which one of them she was trying to convince. Did she want Mel to believe she could protect her now, or did she just want to believe it herself? _I’m better now. I’m good, I’m whole. Goddammit, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine…_

Mel turned her hand over, studied the thin blue veins on her wrist, watched them skip and stumble between Janice’s fingers.

“You think it’ll ever disappear?” she asked. Even as she said the words she realised she didn’t want to know. “This feeling?”

“I don’t know,” Janice said, with gentle honesty. “It’s like I told you after you wasted those idiots: it’s different for everyone. Some of us, it just becomes second nature. We’ve been on the edge so long, we don’t know what it’s like to look down and not feel the drop. Others… I’ve seen it eat ’em alive. They stop eating, stop sleeping, every little noise makes ’em jump out of their skin. It ain’t pretty. Then there’s those who just… forget it. They take some time, shrug it off, and just move on. Make out like it never happened. Might not be healthy, but hey, it works.”

So many options, Mel thought sadly, and not one that seemed like it would fit.

“What about me?” she asked quietly. “You reckon it’ll eat me alive?”

Janice shrugged, then groaned a bit as her shoulder shifted. “That’s on you.”

“I figured it might be.”

They looked at each other for a long, steady moment. Janice was the one who looked away, of course, but it was with a kind of warmth this time, the shyness confessing something deep and honest and true. Mel did not try to catch her eye again; instead she just watched the flush on her neck.

“Look, Mel…” She wrung her hands, visibly struggling to shape the words. “Aw, Christ.”

Mel frowned. “What is it?”

“You don’t have to…” Again, she trailed off, swearing softly. Mel wondered if she’d never had to do this before, if she’d never had someone stick around long enough to need this sort of comfort. “You don’t have to figure it out all on your own, you know? Shoulder or no goddamn shoulder, I’m not going anywhere. So you… you do whatever you have to do to figure out what this means to you. Take as long as you need. We’re not on a damn schedule. And you…” She flushed beet-red. “You don’t have to be the one watching the door all the time, all right? You… you don’t have to…”

But her voice trembled, and then she blushed even redder, and by the time those things dissolved she seemed unwilling or unable to say any more.

Mel understood what she was aiming at, though, what Xena always tried and failed to say to Gabrielle when their shared lives threatened to overwhelm her. It was strange, seeing Xena’s sentiments given a voice, brought to life and refracted through the lens of Gabrielle’s blood. Strange, so very strange, the way those two things had come together in Janice. Gabrielle’s soul was buried so deeply inside of her it was all but lost, but Mel, who knew Xena’s heart as intimately as her own, could see it with all the clarity of a diamond.

 _She is in you,_ she thought, halfway delirious with the weight of the feeling. _Just like Xena’s in me. We can ignore them all we like, can push them aside or pretend they’re not there, but they are. You got bard’s blood just as surely as I got warrior’s, and those things aren’t going nowhere._

The thought, which had once left her so frightened, gave her a new kind of strength now, but she didn’t give it a voice. Why bother? Janice had no interest in talking about Gabrielle; in her mind, the bard was some silly abstract thing, a ‘useless tag-along’ who barely even deserved her own name. Why force her to scale her family tree before she was willing or ready? The good Lord knew they had enough to deal with right now.

So, instead, Mel just bowed her head and said, “Thank you, Janice.”

Janice grunted. “Yeah. No problem.” She touched Mel’s hand again for a breath or two, fingertips shaking against the skin, then pulled away completely with a clumsy little cough. “Listen, I… uh… you mind if I go scrub up a bit? Got that damn disinfectant stink all over me and it’s making me want to heave.”

Mel smiled, amused by the awkward segue and feeling some sympathy as well. Cleanliness probably didn’t feature very highly on Janice Covington’s list of priorities, but Mel recognised that this was about more than just ‘scrubbing up’; they’d had ample opportunity for that back at the doctor’s place. He’d had been kind enough to offer them free use of the facilities; modest though they were, Mel had found them perfectly acceptable for her own needs.

Janice, however, had wanted nothing to do with it. _“I just want to get out of here,”_ she’d whined, squirming and wriggling on the bed like a kid stuck indoors on a summer day. Mel recognised the frantic desperation in her then, and she saw it again now. She didn’t want to wash herself clean of the disinfectant smell; it was the muscle memory that came with it. Mel wished she could say _‘I understand’_ , but Janice would skin her alive just for thinking it.

“Sure,” she said instead. “Go right ahead.”

Janice nodded grimly, then slouched off into the bathroom. Mel watched her go, feeling the panic rise into her chest, her heartbeat swelling to fill the silence.

Alone and unarmed, she felt terribly helpless. If someone did come in through the window despite Janice’s ten thousand checks, she would be the first to go. What was it Janice told her back on the road, when Mel was exhausted and needed to rest? The horror hadn’t really sunk in back then, and all Mel could think about was how exhausted she was, how badly she just wanted to pull the truck over and sleep. Janice had looked her in the eye, serious and somber and in such terrible pain, and said, _“You’d be dead before you even knew it was happening.”_

Mel did not want that. Even after everything that had happened, the conflicts playing out inside her head and her soul, the horror at what she’d become… even after all of that, she did not want to die. She wasn’t like Janice, a walking death wish just praying for the quickest, cleanest way out; she wasn’t like Xena, who had made her peace centuries ago with the inevitability of her own end. Mel Pappas loved life and she loved living. She did not want to die quickly or slowly or any way in between. She wanted to live a long, full happy life.

 _That doesn’t happen to people like us,_ Xena told her.

Though she knew there was no-one there, Mel shook her head. Eyes on the door, nerves all on fire, she dug down deep for a courage that was all her own.

“Maybe not to you,” she said out loud, letting the words fill the room. “But you’re not me. And with God as my witness, I won’t let my fate be yours.”

The warmth that filled her as she finished came from both of them. The heat in Mel’s veins, the hammering of her heart, the panic permeating every pore… it all quieted, fading away as though chased off. She did not feel strong, did not want to feel strong, but she felt brave, and that was all the start she could hope for.

As for Xena… well, she just smiled.

*

Janice stayed in the bathroom for a long, long time.

Mel was stretched out on one the beds when she came back, thumbing through a copy of the Bible. She’d found the book in one of the dresser drawers, a complementary offering from the management or else a lost treasure from some long-departed guest, and had picked it up on a whim. She didn’t know what she was searching for in its pages, judgement or compassion or just a little peace, but all she’d found were old words, and Janice’s timely reemergence was a welcome distraction.

“Feeling better?” Mel asked.

Janice stiffened. “Are you?” she countered, characteristically stubborn in her refusal to answer.

Mel thought about it for a beat or two. “A little.”

Janice cocked her head to the side, like she needed a moment to absorb the honesty. “Yeah?” Off Mel’s nod, she blinked then smiled. “Good.”

It was almost sweet, the way she stared, then blushed and stalked across the room, like she could deny the sentiment was hers if she put enough space between it and herself. When she reached the other bed, she threw herself down on it like a moody teenager, and Mel couldn’t help the way she laughed.

Janice was still a little flushed when she leaned back into the pillows, no doubt warmed by all the hot water; she hadn’t bothered to put her clothes back on, and her lean body seemed to take up much more space than it really did. Cocky and indifferent to Mel’s roving gaze, she wore only her brassiere and a pair of men’s boxers. It was difficult not to stare, quite frankly, and even more so not to notice the way the flush heightened the white of her scars.

Mel remembered how she felt the first time she took Janice’s shirt off, necessity and blood loss demanding that she get to the wound below. The bullet hole was pouring blood, she recalled, and Janice had her hand clamped down to slow the flow; Mel knew that she had to concentrate but she couldn’t stop staring at the scar tissue, the endless rippling shapes carved out from her body. It was different this time, though her body was exactly the same, and Mel was struck by the contrast. Janice’s skin was so healthy now, it made the old pain seem to shimmer and glow.

Noting her focus, Janice smirked. “Like what you see?”

Mel ignored that. “You’ve been through a lot,” she murmured.

Janice shrugged, reclining lazily against the pillows. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” she said in a low voice.

“Well, now,” Mel said, not rightly sure what airplanes had to do with any of this. “I’m not rightly sure that’s true.”

The smirk fell off Janice’s face. “Yeah, me neither.”

Without asking permission, Mel stood and crossed to her side. She knelt beside Janice’s bed, looking up at her body without shame, marking and memorising the scars and sinew. There was a jagged white line along the outside of her left thigh, another on her hip. _Knife wounds,_ Xena’s voice supplied, but Mel didn’t have the courage to ask aloud if that was correct. Though she doubted Janice would volunteer any details, she didn’t want to risk hearing the stories behind them.

What she did want was to touch them. She wanted the contact to confirm what her eyes saw: the simple truth that the injuries were healed, that they had mended long ago, that the bullet wound would follow suit. Soon it too would be little more than a memory and a couple of neat white scars; Mel wanted to touch the ones that were already gone to remind herself of this. Janice had healed before, and she would heal again. Such a simple notion, but so hard for someone like Mel to understand.

“Am I gonna look like that?” she wondered aloud, fingertips hovering over Janice’s hip. The scar was a drunken slash, disappearing coyly under the waistband of her underwear. “If I stick around long enough?”

Janice snorted. “Would it be such a horrible thing?” she asked, trying just a bit hard to sound teasing; she understood the question just fine, Mel could tell, she was just pretending not to. “Looking like me?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Mel said softly.

“Sure it’s not.” Janice covered Mel’s shaking hand with her own, drew it away from her body and laid it on the sheet, a safe distance away. “Look, don’t touch.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Janice studied her for a long time, then sighed. There was a heavy weight behind the sound, like it was such a terrible thing to be looked at, and when she covered her face but not her body it was with a kind of weariness that seemed almost like acceptance, like she’d simply come to accept that her body and the marks left on it weren’t really hers at all. Mel ached, and averted her eyes.

“I’m not less of a woman for getting them,” Janice said, gentle for Mel’s sake but solid as steel for her own. “You know that, right?”

“I think so.”

She didn’t, though, not really, and Janice’s expression grew distant and cold as she sensed the dishonesty.

“Matter of fact,” she said, more than a little defensive, “there’s a few that made me more of one.”

“Lord,” Mel whispered, feeling ill. “Don’t—”

“I won’t. They’re mine, not yours. But it’s not…” She blew out a breath, frustrated once again by the lack of words and her own clumsiness. She hated not being able to express herself; Mel had learned that well. “I know what you’re really asking.”

“Oh?” Mel said, raising a brow. “And what’s that?”

Janice rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s sure as hell not about the pain, is it?” She sighed, then turned away with her whole body. “You’re not scared of getting hurt, Mel. You’re too damn brave for that. You’re not scared of getting bruised or bloodied or beaten or anything like that. You’re scared of getting _ugly_.”

“I’m scared of a lot of things,” Mel said, as soft as she could, as though that could somehow lessen the blow.

Janice chuckled, seeming to appreciate the honesty, evasive though it was. “And ain’t I just a living breathing monument to all of them?”

“No.” But the lie wouldn’t stick, and she sighed. “Maybe.”

But of course it wasn’t as simple as all that. Janice was so much like Xena, and the part of Mel that was Xena knew just how each of those scars might have come to be. She knew exactly what sort of experiences might shape a young girl into a cold hard warrior, exactly what sort of memories might be lurking beneath the jagged white surfaces. How could she expect to separate those things now they were both part of her, the innocent Southern gal who did not want to know and the borrowed soul that already did? Just the sight of Janice was enough to awaken both those things, the part that dreaded and the part that knew; there was nothing in between.

If Janice understood this, if she had any grasp of the complexities at play inside Mel’s head just then, she didn’t let it show. She sat up a little, bracing on the elbow of her good arm, and gave herself a long, appraising look.

“I don’t blame you,” she said after a beat or two. Her voice was light. “I mean that, really. A dame like you… Christ, you shouldn’t want to be like me.”

She said it without judgement, without self-pity. She said it in the voice of someone who had walked her own path too well to ever wish it on anyone, the same sort of voice Mel heard in her head when Xena spoke.

Mel stared at the scar on Janice’s hip, the one on her thigh, the others, big and small, that littered her torso; she stared at the gauze bandage on her shoulder, and tried to imagine what sort of a scar would remain when it was gone. They were all warning signs, bright glaring things saying _‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’_ , and Mel knew that Janice was right in wanting to protect her from that. She’d never wanted it, and she still didn’t. Whether it was the pain Janice had taken or the pain she’d inflicted, it didn’t matter; both of those roads converged in the same place, and they left the same marks.

“I don’t,” Mel said. “I don’t want to be like you, Janice. And I don’t wanna be like Xena either.”

“Good,” Janice said, but Mel wasn’t done.

“But you do,” she pressed. “You want so badly to be like her, you can’t even see that you already are.” She shook her head, saddened for them both. “I’d give anything to rewrite things, make it so we both get the stories we want. You could be Xena’s descendant, and I could be Gabrielle’s, and maybe everything would fit just a little neater. But I can’t do that. No-one can, not even Xena.”

Janice smiled, but it was tight and a little pained. “More’s the damn pity.”

Mel bowed her head, but did not argue. “But not wanting to be _like_ you… Janice, that don’t mean I don’t want to be _with_ you.”

“And what if you can’t have one without the other?” Janice pressed. For perhaps the first time, she sounded like she really cared, like this was somehow more important than the scrolls. “We don’t know what being with Xena did to Gabrielle.”

“No,” Mel said, though that wasn’t strictly true. Xena’s voice had filled in those blanks for her; she didn’t need the scrolls to tell her the rest. “But I know what Xena felt when she thought of her. Whatever might have happened, a hundred generations didn’t change that. She loved Gabrielle as much in that tomb as she did all those lifetimes ago. That’s gotta be worth something, don’t you think?”

“You’ve got a lot more faith than me,” Janice said softly.

 _Well, yes,_ Mel thought, a little wryly. _That’s kind of the point_.

“Someone has to,” she said out loud.

Janice shook her head. “Faith doesn’t get you very far, Mel.”

“Now, I don’t believe that,” Mel said. “And in any case, you’ve gotten on too long already without none. You could use a little faith, I reckon.”

“Yeah?” Janice looked pensive, close to sad. “And what about you? You think your faith will keep you clean?”

“No.” She sighed, allowing herself a long, painful moment of remembering the night that brought them here, the terrible deeds she’d seen and done. “But it might make it easier to live with.”

Janice thinned her lips, but didn’t argue. “I hope so,” she whispered.

“Me too,” Mel said. “But either way, my path’s as set now as yours. Maybe I didn’t know what I was signing on for, coming out here on a whim like I did, wandering into your tent like it weren’t dangerous. And maybe I didn’t realise what kind of monsters would be waking up inside me alongside that old warrior princess. Maybe I was naïve and foolish, and a whole mess of other things besides. But I’m here now, and so is Xena, and that’s not gonna change no more than them scars on your body. If you can survive all that… well, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m gonna survive this too.”

If only for a moment, Janice seemed almost impressed.

“Even if you end up looking like me?” she asked.

Mel studied her long and hard. The brand on her thigh, the one on her hip, the tangled knots of scar tissue sprawling and winding their way across her abdomen. The breath-squeezing brassiere, the men’s underwear, the powerful muscles in her legs and her arms and her shoulders. The gauze, damp but clean, standing out stark and white against the tanned skin. The way her body rippled when she stretched, the calm, careless look on her face.

Janice Covington might not be a handsome woman, but she had all the power and the passion of a warrior princess. She knew what she was and she’d made peace with that; no doubt every one of those scars had its own story, its own particular pain, but the look on Janice’s face said it didn’t matter. They didn’t make her, no more than any of Xena’s countless battles could take away the better person she’d fought so hard to become. They were both warriors, both phenomenal in their own particular way, not handsome but so darn beautiful.

Mel did not want those things for herself, the power or the passion or any of it. But if they were the price to pay for sharing space and thought with these women, then so be it. It might be a steep one, cruel and terrible and filled with unspeakable things; it might be fraught and filled with suffering and struggles. She was sure that it would be. But just as Gabrielle did all those years ago, Mel would pay it without hesitation.

“Well, now,” she said. “I dare say there’s worse people a gal could look like.”

“Oh yeah?” Janice looked down at herself again, frowning. “You sure about that?”

Mel touched her fingers to the gauze at Janice’s shoulder, imagined the wound underneath, and marvelled at how connected she felt to this angry, stubborn woman, the one in front of her and the one inside of her. Janice’s eyes were half-lidded, darkened by things that Mel did not understand, things that Xena did but kept to herself. Watching the rise and fall of her chest, feeling her own catch its rhythm by instinct, knowing with a certainty she could not explain that this was not the first time they’d sat here like this, Mel found that it was not a difficult question to answer.

“I’m sure,” she said to Janice. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

Janice rolled her eyes at the melodrama, then blushed a little.

“Well,” she mumbled. “All right, then.”

Mel smiled. It wasn’t a warrior’s smile, not like Janice’s, but it wasn’t quite a bard’s smile either. It was just… hers.

“You know what?” she said. “I think we will be.”

***


End file.
